Karen McIntyre, Editor02.07.25
Four years after its establishment, Woosh, a company focused on circular solutions for the absorbent products industry, has announced two significant milestones in its efforts to reduce diaper waste through recycling. Last month, the Belgium-based company launched its give-back diaper initiative, a plan whereby the company will sell its ecological baby diapers, primarily to daycare centers, with the understanding it will pick them up after use—to recycle. The diapers will be recycled at Woosh’s new recycling center—its second milestone—which was recently established in Bruges.
Woosh launched its own diaper, which was described as both optimized for recycling and containing recycled materials, in May 2024. The diaper was developed with Ontex, a long-time partner in the company’s mission to reduce diaper waste, and is made with recyclable plastics and avoids materials that could disrupt the recycling process or could reduce the value of the recovered plastics.
The give-back diaper ensures that the products will be recycled, not landfilled or incinerated.
“It’s the same diaper we have been manufacturing,” says CTO Alby Roseveare. “Now we are launching the concept of the give-back diaper. We want to position it within our ecosystem. Whenever you buy one of our diapers, you can always give it back to us and we will recycle it. We are not just putting a diaper out into the world and hoping it gets recycled.”
By focusing on the design of the diaper as well as the process by which is will be recycled, Woosh has been able to adjust each to fit the others’ needs.
“We made specific choices with this diaper to ensure that when we could implement recycling, the product could be well recycled with our process. However, a lot of work went into the recycling process. Diaper recyclability is a big challenge that depends heavily on the process.”
Woosh’s research and development and recycling facility is on the grounds of the inter-municipal waste organization IVBO in Bruges. Thousands of Woosh diapers can be processed daily to repurpose their raw materials into new, valuable products.
“As a result of recycling our give-back diapers, we prevent 2000 tons of diapers—equivalent to 200,000 garbage bags—from ending up in landfills or waste incinerators annually,” says Roseveare. “But this is just the beginning. Our dream is a world without diaper waste, and we’re working towards that goal every single day.”
According to Woosh executives, partners like IVBO were instrumental in bringing the give-back diaper to life.
“Our partnership with Woosh aligns perfectly with our mission to reduce waste streams and reuse valuable materials wherever possible,” says Minou Esquenet, chairwoman of IVBO. “With this new recycling hub, we’re working together towards a more sustainable future for our region.”
As for the repurposed diaper waste, Woosh continues to research options and is working with partners within the recycling world to find a place for the repurposed materials. “Advanced recycling can break them down into the most basic building blocks. New plastics for all types of plastics applications from packaging to injection molding parts, anything,” Roseveare adds.
The development of the first give-back diaper was made possible through close collaboration with various partners like Ontex. “At Ontex, we strive for scalable innovations that combine sustainability and affordability,” says Annick De Poorter, chief innovation & sustainability officer at Ontex. “Our partnership with Woosh has resulted in a diaper that reduces plastic waste and CO2 emissions while offering better recycling possibilities. This reflects our ambition to embed sustainability into every product we create.”
“With our customer Woosh and others, the big difference is optimizing the design of the diaper for recycling,” Bart Jansen, lead product developer, Sustainability, Ontex, says. “If you want to compost a diaper, it’s all or nothing so every piece of that diaper needs to biodegrade and it also cannot leave any microplastics. That is not the case with recycling. With recycling, you can incrementally improve the product for recyclability.”
After focusing on a range of options to reduce diaper waste—including a pilot project with the French social enterprise Les Alchimistes to test diaper pad composting, Ontex decided to put more effort into recycling technology.
“Composting a diaper presents a lot of challenges because it is either all or nothing. Every piece of that diaper needs to be compostable and it cannot leave any microplastics,” Jansen says. “With recycling, you can incrementally import the process by focusing on different components of the diapers. You can focus on the plastic first because it has a greater impact and then you can focus on other parts of the diaper as well.”
“We believe all these solutions will find its place to co-exist in the circular economy. Reusables and compostables can substantially reduce environmental impact but have, to date, other disadvantages that keep them in a niche volume. With today’s knowledge, we believe in the scalability of recycling technology and its potential to be further improved; from smart approaches in collection, separating materials, more advanced material regeneration technologies, and looking at the product composition itself. Our concern with compostable diapers is the affordability and availability of the materials, limiting its scalability. Recycling is also not perfect, but we see more potential for more incremental improvements, with also disruptive innovations still on its way. With Woosh, we focused on recovering the plastics first because these materials currently contribute most to the CO2 footprint of our products.”
”It is a perfect example of the journey of sustainability. It is an overly used word but it is accurate,” says Bart Waterschoot, group sustainability director, Ontex. “You meet one milestone and you take the next step, working towards a fully circular system. The steps are the reasons why it is important for us to have partnerships like the one we have with Woosh.”
Outside of absorbents, materials from diapers recycled using Unicharm technology have found their way into toilet paper being sold under the Poppy Paper brand. These diapers were collected in Shibushi and Osaki in Japan where a public-private partnership collected 98 metric tons of hygiene items including urine pads and wet wipes. The treated materials were then sent to Poppy Paper’s Fukuyo plant to be mixed with small amounts of recycled paper to create toilet paper. The company produced 30,000 toilet paper rolls in a two-month period.
Unicharm first developed its recycling technology through its RefF (Recycle for the Future) project, started in 2015, aimed at recycling absorbent products. Through the use of ozone-based sterilization technology, the company successfully generated recycled pulp that is hygienic and safe and equivalent in quality to unused pulp. After successfully using recycled pulp in some of its hygiene products on a pilot scale, Unicharm partnered with Havix, a manufacturer of airlaid and thermal bonded nonwovens as well as absorbent core materials, to manufacture absorbent materials using the recycled pulp.
According to Unicharm, the circulation-based recycling method allows it to use the limited natural resources repeatedly rather than simply throwing them away.
The way the method works is first the diapers are finely ground up, washed and then separated by the materials—pulp and superabsorbent polymers. At this stage, the materials are still somewhat solid and smelly so the pulp is given a special ozone treatment to destroy the bacteria while the SAP is given an acid treatment that restores its absorbing capability. After those treatments, both pulp and SAP become clean and safe sufficiently enough to be reused to make new disposable diapers.
Unicharm’s efforts to restore SAP involved getting rid of all the moisture absorbents to return it to its original absorbent state. Up until now, it was common to use calcium for removing moisture from SAP. However, with this method, the calcium would remain in the restored SAP which results in lowering its quality.
Unicharm worked on this problem by teaming up with scientists at Hokkaido University and they jointly developed a new method of removing moisture without lowering the quality of SAP by using acid. Researchers then applied the ozone treatment to the SAP as same as pulp to ensure that the restored SAP is completely safe and clean. Unicharm has also focused on collection. The company has partnered with the Japanese city of Shibushi to collect used disposable diapers separately from other garbage. Used diapers are put in a special plastic bag which is then placed in a garbage can specially designed for diapers. This has allowed people in Shibushi to transform approximately one-fifth of their total “wastes, the amount of used diapers, into a renewable resource.”
Unicharm reports that the number of local communities interested in partnering for diaper recycling is growing.
According to Tom Szaky, CEO and founder of TerraCycle, the challenge with diaper recycling largely centers around economics. “Diapers are a big waste stream, expensive to move, expensive to process,” he says. “You need to find someone to fund it,” he says.
But, with absorbent products comprising about 3% of landfill waste, finding an end-of-life solution could have a big impact. “As waste streams go, diapers is probably the juggernaut—the one to take a real bite out of the problem and the one that can make a real difference,” he adds.
TerraCycle is an international leader in innovative sustainability solutions, specializing in creating and operating new platforms in recycling, recycled materials and reuse. Likening the aluminum can to the Cadillac of recyclable materials with a huge value stream, Szaky described diaper as the opposite. “They are expensive and there are huge volumes of them. To make a dent, that is a huge check to write,” he says.
While it has the capability to recycle diapers and has partnered with some major manufacturers, TerraCycle is working with the maker of Huggies diapers to focus instead on outerplastic packaging recycling. The Huggies Free Recycling Program allows participants to recycle the outer plastic packaging of Huggies baby diapers and wipes as well as other Kimberly-Clark products.
“There’s a common misconception that single-use flexible plastic packaging can only be thrown away, but technically, almost anything can be recycled,” says Szaky. “Our partnership with Huggies and Kimberly-Clark makes it easy and convenient for consumers to recycle hard-to-recycle packaging and contribute to a more sustainable future.”
Like many of its fellow hygiene manufacturers, Kimberly-Clark has made some efforts in diaper recycling including a trial, called the Nappy Loop, in South Australia which uses anaerobic digestion to turn the organic materials in used Huggies diapers into nutrient-rich compost, as well as bio-energy that is captured and used to power the recycling process.
These efforts, as well as the efforts of others in the absorbent hygiene space, show continued innovation and a passion for reducing waste. “I am impressed by all of this,” says Ontex’s Jansen. “We are supporters of all of these solutions but as a company you have to choose your battles—where you can do the most for your company and your customers. The big challenge is not the technology, it is how to make the business model work economically.”
Shein, the global online on-demand fashion lifestyle retailer, has marked its latest milestone in its evoluSHEIN strategy with the development of an innovative polyester recycling process with Donghua University, a leading research institute specializing in textile innovation and research, as part of a multi-year collaboration.
This innovative polyester recycling process accepts a wider range of materials, including both pre- and post-consumer polyester feedstock, such as textile waste and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles. This offers greater flexibility in sourcing for feedstock, and as a result, improved cost efficiency compared to the recycled polyester options currently used in Shein’s products. Testing by Donghua’s team of researchers has also shown that the recycled polyester fabrics produced through this process can be recycled repeatedly without significant impact on the material properties of the resulting fabric, as the inputs are chemically broken down, refined, and reconstituted at the polymer level.
At this stage of the project, Shein will be partnering with selected partner fiber manufacturers, to scale up the technology from a laboratory-scale setting to a facility capable of producing recycled polyester fibers at a larger commercial scale. The facility is expected to start large-scale production of polyester fibers in June 2025, with an annual target production output of 3000 metric tons.
Leonard Lin, president of EMEA, global head of Public Affairs, and general manager of Singapore, Shein says, “Our goal is to leverage innovation and technology to help solve industry-wide challenges. In line with our evoluSHEIN strategy, we have invested in the research and development of a new polyester recycling process that allows us to incorporate a broader variety of feedstock, achieve better cost efficiencies, and recycle polyester multiple times without compromising the material properties of the polyester produced. This will be a critical step towards our goal of reducing our reliance on virgin polyester and supporting a broader industry transition. Shein will continue to look for more opportunities to partner with ecosystem players to accelerate use of recycled polyester.”
This collaboration with Donghua University is in line with Shein’s commitment to transition 31% of the polyester used in Shein-branded products to recycled polyester by 2030. Shein also continues to support innovation in circular solutions and encourage adoption of next-generation fibers. In September 2024, Shein launched the evoluSHEIN x Anitta collection, featuring styles made with Regracell—a soft, breathable fiber made from a mix of recycled textile waste and FSC-certified wood inputs. In addition, Shein has partnered with Aloqia (formerly Queen of Raw) since 2022, to incorporate deadstock fabrics - leftover materials from other brands - into exclusive, limited-edition designs. A limited-edition Shein X Rescued collection was launched in May 2024, showcasing designs by Shein X designers using deadstock materials sourced through Shein’s partnership with Aloqia.
Woosh launched its own diaper, which was described as both optimized for recycling and containing recycled materials, in May 2024. The diaper was developed with Ontex, a long-time partner in the company’s mission to reduce diaper waste, and is made with recyclable plastics and avoids materials that could disrupt the recycling process or could reduce the value of the recovered plastics.
The give-back diaper ensures that the products will be recycled, not landfilled or incinerated.
“It’s the same diaper we have been manufacturing,” says CTO Alby Roseveare. “Now we are launching the concept of the give-back diaper. We want to position it within our ecosystem. Whenever you buy one of our diapers, you can always give it back to us and we will recycle it. We are not just putting a diaper out into the world and hoping it gets recycled.”
By focusing on the design of the diaper as well as the process by which is will be recycled, Woosh has been able to adjust each to fit the others’ needs.
“We made specific choices with this diaper to ensure that when we could implement recycling, the product could be well recycled with our process. However, a lot of work went into the recycling process. Diaper recyclability is a big challenge that depends heavily on the process.”
Woosh’s research and development and recycling facility is on the grounds of the inter-municipal waste organization IVBO in Bruges. Thousands of Woosh diapers can be processed daily to repurpose their raw materials into new, valuable products.
“As a result of recycling our give-back diapers, we prevent 2000 tons of diapers—equivalent to 200,000 garbage bags—from ending up in landfills or waste incinerators annually,” says Roseveare. “But this is just the beginning. Our dream is a world without diaper waste, and we’re working towards that goal every single day.”
According to Woosh executives, partners like IVBO were instrumental in bringing the give-back diaper to life.
“Our partnership with Woosh aligns perfectly with our mission to reduce waste streams and reuse valuable materials wherever possible,” says Minou Esquenet, chairwoman of IVBO. “With this new recycling hub, we’re working together towards a more sustainable future for our region.”
As for the repurposed diaper waste, Woosh continues to research options and is working with partners within the recycling world to find a place for the repurposed materials. “Advanced recycling can break them down into the most basic building blocks. New plastics for all types of plastics applications from packaging to injection molding parts, anything,” Roseveare adds.
The development of the first give-back diaper was made possible through close collaboration with various partners like Ontex. “At Ontex, we strive for scalable innovations that combine sustainability and affordability,” says Annick De Poorter, chief innovation & sustainability officer at Ontex. “Our partnership with Woosh has resulted in a diaper that reduces plastic waste and CO2 emissions while offering better recycling possibilities. This reflects our ambition to embed sustainability into every product we create.”
“With our customer Woosh and others, the big difference is optimizing the design of the diaper for recycling,” Bart Jansen, lead product developer, Sustainability, Ontex, says. “If you want to compost a diaper, it’s all or nothing so every piece of that diaper needs to biodegrade and it also cannot leave any microplastics. That is not the case with recycling. With recycling, you can incrementally improve the product for recyclability.”
After focusing on a range of options to reduce diaper waste—including a pilot project with the French social enterprise Les Alchimistes to test diaper pad composting, Ontex decided to put more effort into recycling technology.
“Composting a diaper presents a lot of challenges because it is either all or nothing. Every piece of that diaper needs to be compostable and it cannot leave any microplastics,” Jansen says. “With recycling, you can incrementally import the process by focusing on different components of the diapers. You can focus on the plastic first because it has a greater impact and then you can focus on other parts of the diaper as well.”
“We believe all these solutions will find its place to co-exist in the circular economy. Reusables and compostables can substantially reduce environmental impact but have, to date, other disadvantages that keep them in a niche volume. With today’s knowledge, we believe in the scalability of recycling technology and its potential to be further improved; from smart approaches in collection, separating materials, more advanced material regeneration technologies, and looking at the product composition itself. Our concern with compostable diapers is the affordability and availability of the materials, limiting its scalability. Recycling is also not perfect, but we see more potential for more incremental improvements, with also disruptive innovations still on its way. With Woosh, we focused on recovering the plastics first because these materials currently contribute most to the CO2 footprint of our products.”
”It is a perfect example of the journey of sustainability. It is an overly used word but it is accurate,” says Bart Waterschoot, group sustainability director, Ontex. “You meet one milestone and you take the next step, working towards a fully circular system. The steps are the reasons why it is important for us to have partnerships like the one we have with Woosh.”
Unicharm Goes Commercial
A leader in diaper recycling technology with its circulation-based method, Unicharm continues to expand the scope of its efforts. In April, the Japan-based hygiene products manufacturer began selling disposable baby diapers made using recycled baby diaper materials at select stores in Japan, and it has been making recycled adult diapers since 2022. However, these products represent just a small fraction of its output.In 2024, Unicharm began selling a diaper made from recycled diaper material in select markets in Japan.
Outside of absorbents, materials from diapers recycled using Unicharm technology have found their way into toilet paper being sold under the Poppy Paper brand. These diapers were collected in Shibushi and Osaki in Japan where a public-private partnership collected 98 metric tons of hygiene items including urine pads and wet wipes. The treated materials were then sent to Poppy Paper’s Fukuyo plant to be mixed with small amounts of recycled paper to create toilet paper. The company produced 30,000 toilet paper rolls in a two-month period.
Unicharm first developed its recycling technology through its RefF (Recycle for the Future) project, started in 2015, aimed at recycling absorbent products. Through the use of ozone-based sterilization technology, the company successfully generated recycled pulp that is hygienic and safe and equivalent in quality to unused pulp. After successfully using recycled pulp in some of its hygiene products on a pilot scale, Unicharm partnered with Havix, a manufacturer of airlaid and thermal bonded nonwovens as well as absorbent core materials, to manufacture absorbent materials using the recycled pulp.
According to Unicharm, the circulation-based recycling method allows it to use the limited natural resources repeatedly rather than simply throwing them away.
The way the method works is first the diapers are finely ground up, washed and then separated by the materials—pulp and superabsorbent polymers. At this stage, the materials are still somewhat solid and smelly so the pulp is given a special ozone treatment to destroy the bacteria while the SAP is given an acid treatment that restores its absorbing capability. After those treatments, both pulp and SAP become clean and safe sufficiently enough to be reused to make new disposable diapers.
Unicharm’s efforts to restore SAP involved getting rid of all the moisture absorbents to return it to its original absorbent state. Up until now, it was common to use calcium for removing moisture from SAP. However, with this method, the calcium would remain in the restored SAP which results in lowering its quality.
Toilet paper using repurposed pulp from used baby diapers is for sale in Japan.
Unicharm worked on this problem by teaming up with scientists at Hokkaido University and they jointly developed a new method of removing moisture without lowering the quality of SAP by using acid. Researchers then applied the ozone treatment to the SAP as same as pulp to ensure that the restored SAP is completely safe and clean. Unicharm has also focused on collection. The company has partnered with the Japanese city of Shibushi to collect used disposable diapers separately from other garbage. Used diapers are put in a special plastic bag which is then placed in a garbage can specially designed for diapers. This has allowed people in Shibushi to transform approximately one-fifth of their total “wastes, the amount of used diapers, into a renewable resource.”
Unicharm reports that the number of local communities interested in partnering for diaper recycling is growing.
Up for the Challenge
Procter & Gamble and its joint venture partner Fater were early adapters when they announced a pilot scale diaper recycling operation in Italy in 2018. In fact the pilot seemed to be successful enough for P&G to announce potential future expansion into countries like The Netherlands and India. While P&G was able to achieve significant knowledge about what needs to be done in efforts to recycle both diapers and human waste, more recently the company has scaled back these efforts as it has failed to find new uses for the repurposed waste, particularly the part of the used diaper that encompasses human waste.According to Tom Szaky, CEO and founder of TerraCycle, the challenge with diaper recycling largely centers around economics. “Diapers are a big waste stream, expensive to move, expensive to process,” he says. “You need to find someone to fund it,” he says.
But, with absorbent products comprising about 3% of landfill waste, finding an end-of-life solution could have a big impact. “As waste streams go, diapers is probably the juggernaut—the one to take a real bite out of the problem and the one that can make a real difference,” he adds.
TerraCycle is an international leader in innovative sustainability solutions, specializing in creating and operating new platforms in recycling, recycled materials and reuse. Likening the aluminum can to the Cadillac of recyclable materials with a huge value stream, Szaky described diaper as the opposite. “They are expensive and there are huge volumes of them. To make a dent, that is a huge check to write,” he says.
While it has the capability to recycle diapers and has partnered with some major manufacturers, TerraCycle is working with the maker of Huggies diapers to focus instead on outerplastic packaging recycling. The Huggies Free Recycling Program allows participants to recycle the outer plastic packaging of Huggies baby diapers and wipes as well as other Kimberly-Clark products.
“There’s a common misconception that single-use flexible plastic packaging can only be thrown away, but technically, almost anything can be recycled,” says Szaky. “Our partnership with Huggies and Kimberly-Clark makes it easy and convenient for consumers to recycle hard-to-recycle packaging and contribute to a more sustainable future.”
Woosh has partnered with Ontex to develop a “give-back” diaper, which is optimized for recycling.
Like many of its fellow hygiene manufacturers, Kimberly-Clark has made some efforts in diaper recycling including a trial, called the Nappy Loop, in South Australia which uses anaerobic digestion to turn the organic materials in used Huggies diapers into nutrient-rich compost, as well as bio-energy that is captured and used to power the recycling process.
These efforts, as well as the efforts of others in the absorbent hygiene space, show continued innovation and a passion for reducing waste. “I am impressed by all of this,” says Ontex’s Jansen. “We are supporters of all of these solutions but as a company you have to choose your battles—where you can do the most for your company and your customers. The big challenge is not the technology, it is how to make the business model work economically.”
Shein, the global online on-demand fashion lifestyle retailer, has marked its latest milestone in its evoluSHEIN strategy with the development of an innovative polyester recycling process with Donghua University, a leading research institute specializing in textile innovation and research, as part of a multi-year collaboration.
This innovative polyester recycling process accepts a wider range of materials, including both pre- and post-consumer polyester feedstock, such as textile waste and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles. This offers greater flexibility in sourcing for feedstock, and as a result, improved cost efficiency compared to the recycled polyester options currently used in Shein’s products. Testing by Donghua’s team of researchers has also shown that the recycled polyester fabrics produced through this process can be recycled repeatedly without significant impact on the material properties of the resulting fabric, as the inputs are chemically broken down, refined, and reconstituted at the polymer level.
At this stage of the project, Shein will be partnering with selected partner fiber manufacturers, to scale up the technology from a laboratory-scale setting to a facility capable of producing recycled polyester fibers at a larger commercial scale. The facility is expected to start large-scale production of polyester fibers in June 2025, with an annual target production output of 3000 metric tons.
Leonard Lin, president of EMEA, global head of Public Affairs, and general manager of Singapore, Shein says, “Our goal is to leverage innovation and technology to help solve industry-wide challenges. In line with our evoluSHEIN strategy, we have invested in the research and development of a new polyester recycling process that allows us to incorporate a broader variety of feedstock, achieve better cost efficiencies, and recycle polyester multiple times without compromising the material properties of the polyester produced. This will be a critical step towards our goal of reducing our reliance on virgin polyester and supporting a broader industry transition. Shein will continue to look for more opportunities to partner with ecosystem players to accelerate use of recycled polyester.”
This collaboration with Donghua University is in line with Shein’s commitment to transition 31% of the polyester used in Shein-branded products to recycled polyester by 2030. Shein also continues to support innovation in circular solutions and encourage adoption of next-generation fibers. In September 2024, Shein launched the evoluSHEIN x Anitta collection, featuring styles made with Regracell—a soft, breathable fiber made from a mix of recycled textile waste and FSC-certified wood inputs. In addition, Shein has partnered with Aloqia (formerly Queen of Raw) since 2022, to incorporate deadstock fabrics - leftover materials from other brands - into exclusive, limited-edition designs. A limited-edition Shein X Rescued collection was launched in May 2024, showcasing designs by Shein X designers using deadstock materials sourced through Shein’s partnership with Aloqia.
