BOER GROUP Textile Collection, Sorting and Recycling, Dordrecht

Company overview, and the name on the old listing

This entry was filed under a person's name, Remon Groen, with no company behind it. The website recorded against it tells you what it should have said: this is Boer Group, a Dutch family holding at Kilkade 23, 3316 BC Dordrecht, on +31 (0)78-6180211 and [email protected], Chamber of Commerce number 20085758.

Boer Group is not a sorting plant. It is the parent of a group of collection, sorting, vintage and recycling companies across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France, and that distinction changes how the numbers on this card should be read. It also means the group is already present in this directory twice over without being named: two other entries here are its subsidiaries.

400 tonnes a day, but read what that number covers

The group publishes three daily figures on its own site: 400,000 kg of waste avoided per day, 2,000 direct and indirect jobs worldwide, and 1,372,000 kg of CO2 reduction per day. The footnote under the third one is the most useful text on the whole site, because it shows the working: 3.43 kg of CO2 avoided per kg of re-used textile, sourced to CE Delft, multiplied by total Boer Group production of 400 tonnes a day.

That makes 400 tonnes a day the group's total throughput across every plant it owns, not the output of one building. Compare it with the single sites catalogued here and the shape becomes clear: a Belgian sorter runs 60 tonnes a day, a Hungarian plant more than 100 tonnes a day, a British sorter 900+ tonnes a week. Boer Group is the largest operation in this directory by a wide margin, and it is also the only one that is a group rather than a factory. If you are shortlisting suppliers on capacity, do not put a holding company's consolidated figure in the same column as a plant's daily intake.

The CO2 arithmetic is worth checking before you quote it

The 3.43 kg factor is a genuinely useful number and one of the few citable conversion rates any company in this trade publishes. The way it is applied here deserves a note, though. The factor is stated as CO2 reduction per kg of re-used textile, and the footnote applies it to total production of 400 tonnes a day.

Total production and re-used volume are not the same thing. Four independent houses in this directory publish what actually happens to their intake, and they agree closely: a Hungarian plant reports 41% reuse plus 3% vintage, a Belgian sorter 73% reuse, a London collector an 80/10/5/5 split, an American processor around 45% wearable. Somewhere between a little under half and about three quarters of what arrives is re-used, depending on the stream. Multiply the factor by the re-used share rather than the total and the daily figure falls accordingly. None of this makes the claim dishonest, and Boer Group deserves credit for showing its working at all, which almost nobody else does. It does mean that if you intend to repeat the number in your own reporting, use the group's reuse percentage, not its tonnage.

Two companies already in this directory belong to the group

Reading the group's own history against this directory resolves two entries that looked unrelated.

• Euro Used Clothing, catalogued here as a sorting plant in Zevenbergen with 35 tonnes a day and 45 staff, is a Boer Group company. The subsidiary's own site says it was founded in 2000; the group's history page dates it to 1999. A one-year discrepancy in a founding date is not worth arguing over, but it is a reminder to take dates from the operating company rather than the parent. At 35 tonnes a day it accounts for roughly a twelfth of the group's stated 400.
• Marbo Used Clothing, catalogued here with a Walsall address and a British phone number, was founded in Dordrecht in 1986 by Marinus Boer, the name being a contraction of his own, and became part of the group shortly after. The company is Dutch. Whatever produced the British entry in the older catalogue, it was not the company's own record.

There is a third and more troublesome overlap. The group acquired a German sorting company called Textrade in 2001, alongside Alta-West and Alta Hildburghausen, as part of the FWS deal. This directory separately holds a Textrade Kft in Hungary and a TexTrade UK in Wales, and all three are unrelated businesses in the same trade with effectively the same name. If you are dealing with a "Textrade", establish the country and the registration number before you send anything.

The full group and what each part does

The site names five brands under the innovation heading, which between them describe the whole loop: Boer Group Recycling Solutions (founded 2015, funds and supports recycling research projects), Fashion to Fiber (take-back solutions for brands handling old clothes, returns and unsold goods), Frankenhuis (mechanical recycler, acquired 2018, turning textile waste into feedstock for closed-loop recycling), MOOT in Berlin (a 2022 stake, upcycling waste into new clothing) and umucu (collection of discarded textiles in reuse destination countries, processed back into raw material).

That last one is the unusual entry. Almost every company in this trade ships material one way, from a collecting country to a consuming one, and the story ends at the port. A platform collecting textiles back out of the destination markets is a different proposition and is worth understanding if your own buyers are in those markets, because it changes who competes for the material at the far end.

A hundred and thirty years, told as a trade history

The group publishes its family history in unusual detail, and it doubles as a short history of the European wholesale textile trade. Dirk Boer started collecting rags and scraps door to door in Rotterdam in the 1890s and settled on Josephlaan in 1908. The second generation traded rabbit skins, waste paper, rags and metals. The third invested in a Waalhaven site in 1951, then narrowed the business to post-consumer textiles only during the 1970s, and founded the sorting company Gebotex in 1978, its name a contraction of Gerrit Boer Textiel.

The expansion pattern after that is the one worth studying. Evadam in Roeselare, Belgium, was acquired in 1984; Marbo started in 1986; by 1990 the holding owned five sorting companies in the Netherlands and Belgium. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is named directly as the trigger for the next phase, pushing the group into collection rather than only sorting: Curitas Belgium in 1993, Curitas Netherlands in 1999. In 2001 the group bought FWS, described as one of the largest German collection companies, explicitly to secure supply of unsorted textiles for its own sorting plants. Tardis Vintage followed in 2013 for retro clothing and accessories, Gebetex Tri in Vernon in 2018 as a French joint venture, and Frankenhuis in the same year to close the recycling end.

The logic running through all of it is a supply chain being bought backwards. A sorter's real constraint is not customers, it is the flow of unsorted material arriving at the door, which is why the group's biggest acquisitions are collection companies rather than sorting lines. Anyone reading the sorting process from the buyer's side should keep that in mind: when supply tightens, houses with their own collection keep running and brokers do not.

What you cannot buy from this address

Nothing is offered for sale on the group site. There are no grades, no bale weights, no minimum orders, no prices, no stock lists and no sales contact beyond a general form, because Boer Group is a holding and the trading happens in the subsidiaries. If you want graded bales you approach Gebotex, Evadam, Marbo, Euro Used Clothing or Tardis Vintage directly; if you want recycled fibre you approach Frankenhuis; if you are a brand with returns to place you approach Fashion to Fiber.

That is worth stating plainly because a group of this size shows up in search results above its own operating companies, and buyers regularly write to a holding company and conclude that a supplier does not answer enquiries. The wider European picture the group sits inside is set out in the European secondhand market analysis.

Frequently asked questions

What is Boer Group?

A Dutch family holding company based in Dordrecht that owns collection, sorting, vintage and textile recycling businesses in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France. It has been run by the same family for more than 100 years and is currently in its fifth and sixth generation.

How much does the group handle?

Its own site states 400 tonnes of production a day across the group, 2,000 direct and indirect jobs, and 1,372 tonnes of CO2 avoided daily. The tonnage is a group total, not a single plant's capacity.

Which companies in this directory belong to Boer Group?

Euro Used Clothing in Zevenbergen and Marbo Used Clothing, which the group's history places in Dordrecht from 1986 rather than in the United Kingdom. A German company called Textrade also joined the group in 2001 and is unrelated to the Hungarian and Welsh companies of similar name catalogued here.

Can I buy bales from Boer Group?

Not from the holding company. It publishes no grades, weights, minimums or prices. Purchases are made from the operating companies: the sorting plants for graded clothing, Tardis Vintage for retro, Frankenhuis for recycled fibre, Fashion to Fiber for brand take-back.

Is the CO2 figure reliable?

The factor of 3.43 kg CO2 per kg of re-used textile is attributed to CE Delft and is one of the few published conversion rates in the trade. Note that the group applies it to total daily production rather than to the re-used share, so anyone repeating the number should apply it to the reuse percentage instead.