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A fisherman supplier for SmartFish in Mexico

Social enterprises driving global change on World Food Day

Every year on 16 October, World Food Day highlights important topics such as food waste, sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, and the challenges faced by fishing communities — all in an effort to combat climate change. This year's theme is "Hand in Hand for Better Foods and a Better Future”. It's the perfect opportunity for us to shine a spotlight on the incredible efforts of social entrepreneurs, who are making everyday life better for so many people and how they're creating a more sustainable and inclusive world.

A man sitting a sewing machine mending a black garmet.

RecoMended

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Works to extend the lifespan of textile products and enable scalable, profitable, and circular business models.

Circularity, or the circular economy, is one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which aim to make products last as long as possible through regeneration and systematic thinking. However, achieving this isn’t easy, especially for complex products like textiles, which are produced in large quantities. Many companies lack reliable, scalable, and high-quality systems needed to implement circularity and sustainability into practice.

30%
Location
Karlstad, Sweden

Programme
Everyone’s Business Programme
in partnership with Reach for Change

Website
https://www.recomended.se
RecoMended aims to solve the problem of textile waste by building industrial capacity for restoring used textile products. By combining traditional craftsmanship with innovation and automation, their goal is to enable garments and equipment to be used, sold, or rented repeatedly. This way, they can turn sustainability goals into concrete action, ultimately leading to reduced climate impact, increased resource efficiency, and the replacement of new production.

The enterprise also believes that collaboration is the key to achieving its goal. Currently, they’ve collaborated with some of the Nordic region's leading brands, such as Nudie Jeans, Ridestore, and Lyreco, as well as research partners such as the Swedish School of Textiles in Borås. Together, they hope to unlock future possibilities for high-quality, scalable, and economically sustainable textile repair and restoration.

RecoMended is working to become the most reliable and efficient partner in Europe for large-scale textile circularity by building the core system that helps brands, retailers, and public organisations adopt circular services and products.

We wanted to show that it is possible to create efficient, profitable, and industrially scalable systems for repair and restoration, where textile products – at a fraction of the climate impact – can generate far more revenue than today’s actors achieve.

- Rikard and Erik, co-founders of RecoMended.

Programme support

Through the Everyone’s Business programme with Reach for Change, we’ll support RecoMended in expanding their impact, build key partnerships with stakeholders, and develop their leadership and innovation approach. We look forward to supporting RecoMended in promoting circularity as a valuable business opportunity for the textile industry across Sweden and Europe.