The textile industry is responsible for an estimated 6% of landfill volume, 10% of global emissions, and 20% of global water pollution. Troublingly, textile production and subsequent waste is expected to increase by 50% over the next five years. Textile recycling offers an impactful solution to curbing these metrics, offering a circular material solution able to reduce landfilling, water- and energy-intensive virgin manufacturing, and the pollution caused from dyeing newly manufactured textiles. However, without aggressive policy intervention to support emerging and innovative start-ups, the anticipated flood of textile waste will inundate waste systems before the ecosystem has a chance to develop.
While still nascent, textile recycling is already developing clear technological niches set to calcify into market roles over the next 5-10 years. The proliferated industry incumbent, mechanical recycling, is incredibly energy efficient but has already encountered severe supply chain and technical limitations. Mechanical recycling is unable to recycle synthetic fibers like polyester and polyamide efficiently, pigeonholing it to smaller market shares like plant fibers or animal fibers. In terms of supply chain, post-consumer feedstocks are not available in required purity, leading to low quality offtake products from mechanical recyclers.
Given the dominance of synthetic fibers in textile production, there is a large market opportunity for technologies able to efficiently extract synthetic fibers. Advanced recycling, a set of physicochemical reactions used for fiber extraction from waste textiles, are the only technologies suited to fill this role. Ultimately, the goal of these advanced recycling technologies is to recycle blended fabrics, often labeled as polycotton textiles. With around a decade of evidence, clear process and feedstock specializations can be drawn around the technologies in question including mechanical recycling, solvent dissolution, depolymerization, gasification, and pulping.
Figure 1 Global Fiber Production (in million tons and %1 of global fiber production)
Textile Recycling Innovations
The advanced recycling technologies impacting the market today are solvent dissolution, depolymerization, gasification, and pulping. Each process offers differing benefits and feedstock specializations:
- Mechanical Recycling: Process of shredding and grinding waste fibers into similar lengths before weaving them together as a low quality recyclate with limited applications.
- Solvent Dissolution: Use of solvents to dissolve polymer fibers out of mixed textile waste. Specializing in polyester and poly-cotton blends, solvent dissolution produces pure cotton and polyester fibers as offtake products.
- Depolymerization: Several processes fall under this category. They utilize an intermediary chemical reaction to break down polyester and polyamide (nylon) in textile waste into monomers to be repolymerized back into textiles. Additionally, PET is often depolymerized from plastic bottles and converted into polyester textiles. Depolymerization specializes in synthetic fibers but struggles with blended poly-cotton textiles compared to solvent dissolution.
- Gasification: Textile waste is heated at high temperatures with CO2 as a gasifying agent to manufacture synthetic gas (syngas). Gasification is primarily used to convert highly contaminated or difficult to sort textile waste into fuel, energy, and chemical products.
- Pulping: Cellulose-based textiles are broken down into a pulp, similar to paper recycling. Pulping is an especially useful technology to produce viscose, the largest market share in manmade cellulosic fiber manufacturing. Pulping is already a scaled technology likely to establish its market share in cotton feedstocks.
Plastic Recycling Innovator Spotlight
- Worn Again Technologies: Textile recycler specializing in extracting PET and cotton using organic solvents DMSO, DMI, and propyl benzoate. They are transferring a successful solvent dissolution plastic recycling technology to textile feedstock and are entering commercial operations in Europe where feedstocks are most abundant. Expect a 2027 open date for their first commercial facility.
- Syre: H&M-backed start-up commercializing improved efficiency polyester depolymerization focused on handling higher contamination. The company is pursuing three facilities for global hubs: North Carolina, Iberia, and Vietnam.
- Samsara Eco: Australian depolymerization start-up capitalizing on enzymatic depolymerization to recycle both polyester and polyamide. Most of their commercial success has been with polyamide, but the company is investing heavily in artificial intelligence in their enzyme design to improve reaction efficiency and feedstock opportunities.
Plastic Recycling Trends and Long-Term Outlook
The textile recycling industry continues to lag behind plastic recycling despite very similar technologies emerging between the sectors. Near virgin recyclate remains 50-100+% more expensive than virgin textiles. Textile recyclers hope that mimicking the economies of scale in virgin textile production will deliver reduced operating costs. To reach this point, recyclers must improve their tolerance for blended textiles through innovations like solvent dissolution or wait for sortation infrastructure to deliver incremental improvements to feedstock quality year on year.
The key takeaway on textile recycling investment is a need for new approaches. Renewcell’s bankruptcy signaled that textile recyclate was not a high demand product and would likely not experience natural growth in consumer or corporate demand. A global plastic treaty compounds this worry for investors, start-ups, and waste systems as consumer demand creates unprecedented levels of waste. Europe became a key battleground for initial policy lobbying to increase collection, sortation, and transportation infrastructure with key success stories including Germany’s 70+% collection rate.
Several American states and the EU have enacted comprehensive and severe Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies, forcing manufacturers to responsibly handle their waste through recycling and reuse. Additionally, blended finance and infrastructure from public and private investors have invigorated the larger textile waste supply chain. Waste managers like Goodwill and WM are collaborating to improve state-owned sortation infrastructure while large chemical recycler Eastman pursues applications for their scaled facilities.
Despite several promising innovations, textile recycling is struggling to reach much beyond demonstration facility scale. Realistically, governments must help create a more robust textile waste management system if textile recycling is going to reach commercial viability and reduce expected environmental harm from increasing polyester manufacturing.
