On Georges-Cros Street in Granby, in Quebec’s Monteregie region, RD Recyclage takes a category of waste most people never think twice about, old cotton t-shirts and worn-out garment stock, and turns it into a product that keeps garages, body shops, and paint booths running: industrial cleaning rags sold under the brand name Econ-o-Coton. Rather than dealing in retail clothing or antiques, this business operates at the industrial supply end of the secondhand textile world, cutting recycled 100 percent cotton t-shirts into rags marketed as economical, clean, absorbent, and genuinely useful for the kind of grimy wipe-down work that ordinary paper towels cannot handle.
The company’s customer base runs through the trades: factories, mechanics and auto repair garages, body shops, professional painters, paint retailers, and concrete pumping operations all rely on a steady supply of cotton rags for wiping down equipment, cleaning up spills, and handling jobs where a disposable, absorbent cloth beats a paper towel or a rag that has to be laundered and reused. RD Recyclage positions its pricing as the deciding factor for these buyers, stating plainly that its rates are the lowest available and backing that claim with a guarantee, an appeal aimed squarely at shop owners and purchasing managers who buy rags by the case rather than the handful and for whom small per-unit savings add up quickly across repeat orders.
What separates this operation from a typical rag supplier is the sorting and export work happening behind the scenes. Clothing donations and used garments that are not suitable for the cotton-rag production line do not simply go to waste. Instead, RD Recyclage exports non-cotton clothing to markets in Africa and resells other usable items to small retailers and thrift stores, meaning the business runs a layered recycling operation rather than a single-purpose rag factory. Cotton fiber becomes industrial cleaning supplies close to home in Granby, while other garments get a second life through export and resale channels that keep them out of the waste stream entirely. That three-way split, cotton to rags, other fabric to export markets, and remaining stock to local resellers, lets the company squeeze practical value out of nearly every piece of clothing that passes through its facility.
For a business owner in Granby or across the Eastern Townships looking to stock up on dependable, inexpensive shop rags without paying for a specialty industrial supplier, RD Recyclage offers a straightforward, locally produced alternative built entirely around materials that would otherwise be discarded. The operation also gives area residents and organizations a productive outlet for used textiles that fall outside typical thrift store donations, since worn-out or stained clothing unsuitable for resale can still feed directly into rag production rather than heading to a landfill. It is a quietly practical piece of the regional recycling economy, converting old t-shirts into a product tradespeople reach for every day.
RD Recyclage is a Granby, Quebec manufacturer that converts recycled cotton t-shirts into Econ-o-Coton industrial cleaning rags for garages, body shops, and factories, while exporting and reselling other used clothing rather than sending it to landfill.
