Textile recycling

Textile recycling methods

Textile recycling methods aim to break down fabrics into a material that can be reprocessed into new useful products. Natural fibers often are shredded, blended, and combed, to thereafter be processed into cloth.

There are two dominant textile recycling methods: mechanical processing and chemical processing. Mechanical processing is mainly performed on regular fibers, while chemical processing focuses on synthetic fibers.

Mechanical processing

The most common textile recycling technique is mechanical processing, which often occurs after the material separation process as the fabrics first need to be extracted from a waste stream. To avoid re-dying, raw material is sorted based on color. After complete separation, the textile materials are shredded and separated into fibers. Following this process, carding occurs, a mechanical process that disentangles, cleans, and intermixes fibers in preparation for further treatment. The mechanical processing of textiles is finalized by spinning the fibers with cotton fibers to ensure higher quality.

Chemical processing

Chemical processing is performed to break down and thereafter reform synthetic fibers such as PET, nylon, and polyester. Chemical processing is a relatively new phenomenon when performed for recycling purposes. Chemical processing of fibers includes depolymerization which removes material such as dyes and unwanted fibers to diminish contamination and make the material stream process-ready. After this, polymerization occurs producing much higher quality fibers compared to the fibers produced by mechanical processing.

Textile recycling process

The recycling of textiles differs depending on whether the recyclable fiber is natural or synthetic. For natural fibers, the textile recycling process starts by sorting incoming processible textiles and sorting them based on the type of material and color. Color sorting prevents re-dying to save energy, water, and diminish pollution. After sorting, the fibers are shredded where sometimes other materials are added to ensure higher quality. The now combined material stream is cleaned by a carding process. Concluding the process, the yarn is spun, woven, or knitted, or compressed for textile filling purposes.

With synthetic fibers, the process is a bit different, the recyclable material is first shredded such as in the processing of natural fibers. But then, the process differs because the shredded material is further granulated, into synthetic chips. Following, the material is depolymerized and then again polymerized to create new fibers ready to be used for new fabrics.

Innovations in textile recycling

One of the biggest problems in the circular economy is the increasing quantity of fashion waste because of the ever-expanding consumption economy. Hence why innovations in textile recycling are of such importance, because these innovations can help diminish this increasing pressure on the circular economy.

Because most textile recyclers to date can only recycle and recover one or at most two materials from a recyclable item, most new innovations are aiming to increase the recovery of the number of different materials per item. Because of the fast consumption fashion industry, innovations in textile recycling will remain a topic of high interest to be able to achieve a more circular economy in the future.