Fast fashion retailer Primark has signed a multi-year purchase agreement with next-generation textile fiber recycling company Circ to buy recycled polyester. The agreement is set to take effect in 2029, but neither party disclosed the specific amount or purchase volume. As a supporting arrangement, Circ has committed to investing about $500 million to build a recycled polyester plant in France to serve demand including Primark's. This is also Circ's first industrial-scale recycling plant for synthetic fiber processing, and the first purchase contract between Primark and a next-generation recycling company—for Circ, the agreement means it must deliver on its capacity commitments at commercial scale.

The new plant is located in Saint-Avold in northeastern France, designed to process 70,000 tons of textile waste per year, with project funding coming from both equity and debt financing. Circ CEO Peter Majeranowski made clear that the agreement with Primark does not by itself provide construction funding for the plant.

The Circ technology planned for the plant aims to separate polyester-cotton blends, recover cellulose from the cotton, and extract PTA and MEG—the two basic components of polyester.

On the procurement side, Primark is increasing the share of recycled fibers in its garments. The company recently disclosed that 39% of the clothing it sold in the previous fiscal year contained recycled fibers, up 32 percentage points year on year; it has also committed to eliminating conventional materials from its garments by 2030. Financially, Primark recorded a 14% decline in net profit in its home market for the fiscal year ended 2025, but revenue still stood above 1.9 billion euros: specifically 1.903 billion euros, up 2.64% year on year.

Putting this deal back into the industry context, it reflects two parallel trends: first, large apparel retailers are locking in recycled raw material supply through long-term offtake agreements; second, recycling technology companies are using the certain procurement demand from the retail side to secure both capital and orders for industrial-scale capacity that often costs hundreds of millions of dollars—but whether this model of using purchase commitments to drive capacity construction can be replicated in other fiber categories and at earlier technology stages remains a key point to watch.

Source: Modaes