TEXVAL Kft. Used Clothing Sorting and Export, Hungary

Company overview, and the country in the old title

This entry was filed as a British exporter. It is not. Texval Kft is Hungarian, at Algyő, Jura, Ipari Park 87, 6750 Hungary, on +36 62 203 063 and [email protected], open Monday to Friday from 8:00 to 16:00. The suffix Kft is the Hungarian equivalent of Ltd, which is most likely how the company ended up recorded as a UK business. The site runs in English and French, the second of which tells you where a good deal of the output goes.

The scale is the first thing to take in. Texval reports a 10,500 m² working area, more than 200 employees, and over 100 tonnes of material processed every day, with fifteen years behind it and exports to five continents. A hundred tonnes a day is roughly four forty-foot containers of incoming material each working day, which makes this the largest processor in this directory by a clear margin.

The most detailed cascade figures published by anyone here

Most houses either publish nothing about what happens to the material or give a single reuse percentage. Texval breaks the whole day's intake down:

• Over 41% goes to the reused market as wearable clothing.
• 3% is separated as vintage.
• The remainder goes to recycling as fabrics and yarns.
• Only 6% ends up in landfill, with the company quoting 93% recovery overall.

Add the first two and you get 44% wearable, which lands squarely inside a band this directory has now seen from four independent companies on two continents: a Belgian sorter at 40%, an American processor at 45%, a Dutch collector at 50%, and now a Hungarian plant at 44%. Four houses, four countries, four different waste streams, one answer. If you buy unsorted material, plan on a little under half of it being sellable as clothing and treat any promise of much more as a claim about something else.

The 3% vintage line is the genuinely new number

No other company in this catalogue puts a figure on its vintage fraction, and that single number explains a great deal about who can and cannot sell you vintage.

Three per cent of a hundred tonnes a day is three tonnes of vintage daily. That is a real production line, enough to supply buyers on a standing schedule. Now run the same percentage against a smaller house: a plant sorting five tonnes a day produces 150 kg of vintage in a day, which is a rail, not a programme. This is why so many suppliers will happily discuss vintage and then quietly fail to fill a repeat order, and it is not dishonesty, it is arithmetic.

So when a supplier offers vintage, the useful question is not the price but the volume behind it: how many tonnes a day do you sort, and what share of that is vintage? Read alongside the figure a Birmingham exporter publishes, that cream is about 5% of second-hand clothing, you now have the top of the pyramid from two directions, and both are thin. Anyone comparing second-hand clothing suppliers on the strength of their premium lines should be doing this multiplication first.

Two certifications from two continents

Texval states certification under EuRIC Textiles and SMART. That combination is unusual: EuRIC is the European recycling industries' confederation and its textiles branch sets standards for sorting operations, while SMART is the long-standing American association for the secondary materials and recycled textiles trade.

Holding both is a practical signal rather than a decorative one. It means the house has submitted to a European standard for how sorting is documented and, separately, sits inside the North American trade's own framework, which matters if you are buying across both markets and want one supplier whose paperwork will not surprise you at either end. As always, ask for the certificate itself with its number and expiry, since a logo on a homepage is not the same thing as a current certification.

Packing, service and what is missing

Packing is described as bags and bales in a range of sizes and weights, chosen for the shipment rather than to a single house standard, and the company says its team helps buyers pick the category suited to the destination market and then handles the shipping arrangements. That first part is worth taking up: a house that sorts a hundred tonnes a day has seen what sells in most markets, and asking them what a given country actually buys costs nothing.

What is not published matters too. There are no grade names, no bale weights, no minimum order and no prices, which for a plant of this size is a surprising gap and means the entire specification has to be built by email before a first order. The account of how sorting houses handle incoming material explains what those grade names would describe, and the standard grade vocabulary is what a wholesale buyer needs to write that specification.

One more honest note about the site itself. The services page still carries unedited template text from a waste-collection website, offering to collect your rubbish and discussing bin bags. It is left-over boilerplate from whoever built the page, not a description of the business, but it is a reminder to read a supplier's site for what it states about its own operation rather than for the polish around it.

Frequently asked questions

Is Texval a British company?

No. Texval Kft is Hungarian, based at Algyő, Jura, Ipari Park 87, 6750 Hungary. The Kft suffix is the Hungarian equivalent of Ltd, which is probably why it was listed as a UK business.

How much does the plant process?

Over 100 tonnes of material a day across a 10,500 m² site with more than 200 employees, which makes it the largest processor in this directory.

What happens to the material?

The company reports over 41% going to reuse, 3% separated as vintage, the rest recycled into fabrics and yarns, and only 6% reaching landfill.

Is Texval certified?

It states certification under EuRIC Textiles and membership of SMART, covering both the European and North American sides of the trade.

What is not published?

Grade names, bale weights, minimum orders and prices do not appear on the site, so the specification has to be agreed in writing before ordering.