BekaertDeslee Australia’s New Factory
by BekaertDeslee 15/07/2026
A Sustainability Journey, News
by BekaertDeslee 15/07/2026
A Sustainability Journey, News
This article was contributed by BekaertDeslee.
For 67 years, BekaertDeslee has been weaving and knitting mattress fabric in Melbourne’s south-east, first from Lyndhurst starting in 1957, then from a Dandenong South site the company called home for 57 years. That run has just ended. BekaertDeslee Australia has completed its move into a purpose-built manufacturing facility at ESR’s Enterprise Industry Park in Pakenham, Victoria, a project the company describes as a genuine reset rather than a simple relocation.
BekaertDeslee is a specialist mattress textile manufacturer headquartered in Waregem, Belgium, and part of the German family equity group Haniel. The Pakenham facility is its Australian manufacturing base, and the move is a useful case study in what efficiency-led manufacturing looks like when a company puts it into steel and concrete instead of a strategy document.
Construction began with a groundbreaking ceremony that included a smoking ceremony performed by members of the local Bunurong tribe, and the project reached practical completion in mid-2026, with BekaertDeslee marking a grand opening at the new site. The building consolidates operations that were previously split across an older facility under a single roof, a design choice the company says was made specifically to improve workflow, cut waste, and reduce the energy overhead of running a fragmented site.
BekaertDeslee was one of the first two tenants to commit to Enterprise Industry Park, alongside Kumho Tyre Australia. The estate itself, a joint venture between ESR and Mitsubishi Estate, is being delivered to a minimum 4-Star Green Star rating under the Green Star Building scheme, Australia’s benchmark rating system for sustainable buildings.
JLL’s industrial team has pointed to BekaertDeslee’s relocation as an example of manufacturers moving toward growth corridors like Pakenham, in Melbourne’s south-east, to secure lower occupancy costs and future-proofed infrastructure, at a time when developable industrial land closer to the city is running out.
The Pakenham rebuild sits inside a larger sustainability push that BekaertDeslee has been rolling out globally, and which now shapes how its Australian operations run day to day.
The company has set near-term emissions targets validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), committing to cut Scope 1 and 2 emissions by roughly 65% and Scope 3 emissions by 30% by 2030, measured against a 2021 baseline. Group-wide, BekaertDeslee reports energy efficiency gains of 25 to 30%, renewable electricity use reaching 34% of its supply, and recycled content in its products climbing to around 11%, according to its climate and energy policy. Ruben Puype, BekaertDeslee’s Sustainability Director, has described the approach as a direct focus on “energy efficiency, renewable energy, and eco-design” across the business, backed by a Carbon Compare Tool the company uses to measure and communicate its CO2-impact on product level to customers.
On the product side, BekaertDeslee has partnered with Belgian circularity specialist Resortecs since 2022 to develop mattress covers designed to be pulled apart at end of life rather than incinerated. The two companies use a heat-dissolvable thread called Smart Stitch, which allows components that would normally contaminate a recycling stream, like zippers and labels, to be separated out automatically. That work has since expanded into ReCover, a two-year research project with Resortecs and digital traceability company TripleR.io, backed by Flemish innovation agency VLAIO, aimed at building a fully recyclable mattress cover and a digital product passport for tracking materials through their lifecycle.
Mattresses are a genuinely hard recycling problem, and BekaertDeslee’s own sustainability team has been candid about why. Ruben Puype, the company’s Sustainability Director, has pointed to a lack of dedicated mattress collection and sorting infrastructure, along with textiles that combine too many materials to separate economically, as the core obstacles to circularity in bedding.
Australia is working through the same problem from the policy side. Mattresses have been named on the Federal Minister for the Environment and Water’s Priority List for product stewardship action for two years running, and the Australian Bedding Stewardship Council now coordinates a national network of approved recyclers, since a mattress can’t currently be fully recycled onshore and the industry needs collection infrastructure that doesn’t yet exist everywhere. A manufacturer redesigning its covers for disassembly, and rebuilding its own facility for efficiency in the process, is a direct and practical response to that gap, rather than a side initiative.
A 67-year-old Melbourne manufacturer has just committed real capital to a single-roof, efficiency-first facility, inside an industrial estate built to a defined sustainability standard, while its parent company works through emissions targets that an independent body has checked and approved. Each of those pieces is verifiable on its own, and together they show a company translating sustainability commitments into physical infrastructure rather than leaving them on a policy page.
For an industry working hard to figure out how to make mattresses genuinely circular, that combination of a rebuilt factory, validated emissions targets, and active recycling research gives BekaertDeslee a credible, on-the-ground answer to a hard problem, and a useful marker for anyone tracking how manufacturing sustainability actually gets built in this country.
Where is BekaertDeslee’s new Australian factory located?
BekaertDeslee Australia’s new manufacturing site is at ESR’s Enterprise Industry Park in Pakenham, Victoria, replacing a Dandenong South facility the company operated for 57 years.
How long has BekaertDeslee operated in Australia?
BekaertDeslee’s Australian operations date back to 1957, when the company was established in Lyndhurst, Victoria, making the Pakenham move a 67-year milestone.
Who owns BekaertDeslee?
BekaertDeslee is headquartered in Waregem, Belgium, and is part of Haniel, a Duisburg-based German family equity group.
What are BekaertDeslee’s global emissions targets?
BekaertDeslee has SBTi-validated targets to cut Scope 1 and 2 emissions by roughly 65% and Scope 3 emissions by 30% by 2030, against a 2021 baseline.
How is BekaertDeslee making mattress covers more recyclable?
BekaertDeslee implements ecodesign principles throughout the development process of new fabric designs. In addition to increasing the use of recycled content, BekaertDeslee makes its covers ready for recycling by maximising the use of mono-materials and providing solutions for materials that currently hinder recycling, such as zippers, labels, and PFAS (“forever chemicals”).
Through a partnership with Resortecs since 2022, BekaertDeslee uses heat-dissolvable Smart Stitch thread to design mattress covers that can be automatically disassembled for recycling, an approach it’s extending through the ReCover research project with TripleR.io. This way, hindering components can still be separated from the recyclable fabrics.
What does BekaertDeslee manufacture?
BekaertDeslee is a specialist in developing high-quality and on-trend woven and knitted fabrics. BekaertDeslee manufactures mattress textiles, mattress covers and innovative sleep solutions, including antibacterial HealthGuard-treated fabrics and Blue Butterfly certified fabric, which helps people live better with asthma and allergies. BekaertDeslee produces sustainable fabrics using materials such as SEAQUAL recycled ocean-plastic yarn and Tencel-based fibres.