MAASTRICHT – Clean-tech start-up Healix is building a circular fibre regeneration plant in the Netherlands, having secured funding totalling over €10 million in its seed financing round completed this month.
The Maastricht plant will shred, wash and reprocess used twine, ropes, nets and other plastic fibre waste from farming and fishing into pristine circular new polymers for the nonwovens and technical textiles industries. It is expected to be operational in the first quarter of 2022 and will have an annual capacity of 6,000 metric tons of polypropylene (PP) and high density polyethylene (HDPE), saving almost 10,000 metrics tons of CO2 emissions per year.
One of the most pressing issues the technical textile industry is facing, is the damaging effect of plastic fibre waste on terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Healix aims to combat this by transforming existing linear economies in the technical textile industry into sustainable circular economies.
The company’s seed funding round was led by private equity firm Active Capital Company and facilitated by ABN AMRO Asset Based Finance and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency. The investment involves commitments from industrial and high performance fibre supplier FibrXL and Tama, the market leader in crop baling solutions.
“These investments enable us to proceed at full speed with the commissioning of our production facility and the recruitment of the skilled professionals needed to take our flagship project forward,” said Healix founder and CEO Marcel Alberts.
“For us, this is much more than an investment,” added Jeroen Drenth, CEO of FibrXL. “This is a pathway to change the environmental impact of the technical textile industry, as it provides a technology solution that makes fibre-to-fibre recycling possible. And most importantly, this is only the beginning.”
