Clothing Recycling Is Taking a Giant Leap Forward – Reasonstobecheerful

According to estimates by the European Environment Agency, the fashion industry is responsible for 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The production of textiles consumes huge amounts of water, cotton, wood, fertilizer and petroleum-based plastics, and contributes to deforestation and agricultural waste.

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Its research helped launch the startup Eeden, which uses chemical recycling to break down polyester into its basic components and obtain cellulose from cotton wool. A pilot plant is planned for 2025. In Braunschweig, in northern Germany, the established recycling specialist Rittec has developed its own method for removing polyester from blended fabrics. And the French company Carbios is involved in the fiber-to-fiber recycling of polyester using enzymes. (It’s no coincidence that many processes deal with polyester –– at 55 million tons per year, it is now the main raw material in textile production, more than twice as common as cotton.)

There are basically two processes for recycling textiles: mechanical and chemical. Mechanical separation can work, but the process damages and shortens textile fibers. After being recycled two or three times, the fibers “are so short that they can no longer be reused for the production of textiles,” says Sabrina Mauter. Chemical processes break down the raw materials into their basic components, such as monomers and polymers, allowing them to be recycled again and again.

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