For its 30th edition, Drapers Awards 2021 celebrates the retailers, brands, suppliers, and agencies that have innovated to survive, and built stronger businesses under the toughest of circumstances in the fashion industry. Recover™ was honored with the Disruptor Award, which recognizes the new or disruptive business models that are rising to prominence in the UK and Irish fashion industry, with judges commenting that Recover™ was “very, very impressive” and offered a solution that many fashion retailers could use.

Recover™ is a fourth-generation family-owned company with a 70-year long history in textile recycling and that uses textile waste from post-industrial and post-consumer origins as raw material to produce its low-impact, high-quality fiber. Replacing 1kg of cotton with Recover™ recycled cotton saves up to 14,740 litres of water, 1.1kg of pollutants and 23kg of CO2 emissions.

Recover´s innovative business model aims make its recycled fiber available to any brand in the fashion industry as seen with its successful partnership with Primark in 2021, and is confronting the challenges of scalability and circularity in the fashion industry head on. To meet growing demand and help brands meet their sustainable goals, the company aims scale its production to 200,000 metric tons of recycled cotton fiber per year by 2025. This will save nearly three trillion liters of water each year, equivalent to the drinking water consumed by 3 billion people on an annual basis and allow 500,000 acres of land to be directed away from cotton cultivation for other uses.