SOEX TEXTIL-VERMARKTUNGSGESELLSCHAFT MBH

Their core work

SOEX is a German industrial-scale textile recycling and secondary marketing company that collects, sorts, and channels post-consumer textiles back into value chains. In H2020 projects, they contributed what most research partners cannot: access to real, industrial-volume waste textile streams — the raw material that circular economy projects need to be credible beyond the lab. Their coordinator role in RESYNTEX shows they can lead complex multi-partner technical projects, not just supply feedstock. They sit at the critical junction between end-of-life textile collection and the chemical and material recovery industries that need those waste inputs.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Both H2020 projects started in 2015, which limits temporal trend analysis — there is no meaningful early-vs-late shift visible within this dataset. What can be said is that SOEX entered H2020 simultaneously as both a project coordinator (RESYNTEX, industrial chemistry pathway) and a consortium participant (Trash-2-Cash, design-driven upcycling), suggesting they deliberately explored two distinct routes to textile waste valorization in parallel. The absence of later H2020 projects may indicate a strategic choice to deepen work outside EU-funded research, or that their industrial focus moved toward scaling up RESYNTEX results commercially rather than pursuing further research grants.

SOEX appears to be moving toward chemical-route recycling — converting mixed textile waste into industrial feedstock — rather than product-level upcycling, which aligns with where the textile recycling industry is heading under extended producer responsibility legislation.

How they like to work

SOEX takes on leadership roles — they coordinated RESYNTEX, the larger and more technically ambitious of their two projects, pulling together partners from across 14 countries. With 40 unique consortium partners across only 2 projects, they clearly operate in large, diverse consortia rather than tight bilateral arrangements. This profile suggests they function as an industrial anchor in research consortia: bringing the waste supply chain that gives projects real-world credibility while relying on research partners to provide the chemistry and engineering expertise.

SOEX built a network of 40 unique partners across 14 countries from just two projects — an unusually broad reach that reflects the pan-European nature of textile waste and chemical recovery consortia. Their network spans both textile industry players and chemical sector partners, making them a natural bridge between these two value chains.

What sets them apart

SOEX's core differentiator is industrial access: they are not a research organization studying textile waste, they are a company that processes it at scale every day. This gives any consortium they join immediate credibility with reviewers and a direct route to industrial validation of results. Few partners in the textile circular economy space can simultaneously provide waste feedstock supply, market knowledge of secondary textiles, and the coordination capacity to lead a 40-partner Innovation Action project.

Highlights from their portfolio

• RESYNTEX
  SOEX coordinated this €841K Innovation Action — the highest-funded project in their portfolio — targeting conversion of mixed textile waste into chemical and textile industry feedstocks, a technically ambitious and commercially significant pathway.
• Trash-2-Cash
  Notable for combining design methodology with waste fibre valorization, demonstrating SOEX's willingness to engage across disciplinary boundaries beyond industrial chemistry.