How Textile Recycling Methods are Revolutionizing Sustainability

Fanny Liao, Senior Vice President of RD, Far Eastern New Century in a recent interaction with Asia Business Outlook magazine shared her views on how innovative recycling methods can help in significantly reducing textile waste and its environmental impact, what role can brands and retailers play in educating consumers about responsible textile recycling and more.

The textile industry is a major source of pollution, with millions of tons of fabric waste ending up in landfills or incinration each year. How can innovative recycling methods help in significantly reducing textile waste and its environmental impact?

We are all aware that textiles are made of many different materials in a single fabric. For example, you have polyester, cotton, nylon, lycra, and hemps etc., all these different kinds of materials may come in one fabric. Therefore, for a secondhand textile waste it will become a huge problem if it leads to landfilling or incineration, which in turn will lead to a lot of pollution.

Every year, millions of tons of fabric waste ends up polluting our land and our air. Thus for a long time, this has been a big problem, but we do not have a good solution except to try and sell secondhand garments or downgrade use as mops  etc. However, most of them, cannot be worn again and this is another issue. Hence, in order to recycle this complicated fabric, you have to think about a good way to recycle and reuse. Today, most of the textile fabric - more than 60%, is made of polyester and about 75% of the fabrics are containing polyester.

The rest of the 20% is made of cotton. Thus, the most important factor is you have to recycle polyester as it contributes to a majority of the textile waste.

FENC(Far Eastern New Century Corp.) is  a fully integreated polyester house. Here we began our research 15 years ago to see how we can recover those polyester fabrics. Now, at this moment, we have come up with a solution where we want to recycle the polyester back to the monomers, which are used to make the polyester. Thus, if you can degrade it back to monomers, the polyester becomes the raw materials, and then you can remake the polyester again. Hence, we can keep the material in the loop for circular economy, which is important.

We can recycle the textile waste. Besides that, we sell it as a second hand garment, or we use as a downgrade use. If we can recycle it back to the original materials, we can reduce a lot of waste, and reduce environmental pollution. Therefore, this is our goal. We want to have an innovative recycling method, bring the polyester back to the raw materials. Hence, we are developing a process called ChemCycle. It's a chemical recycling process to regenerate the raw materials from the polyester to make polyester again.

Consumers often lack awareness of sustainable textile disposal options. What role can brands and retailers play in educating consumers about responsible textile recycling?

It is important that we try to wear the clothes a lot of times. Firstly, we should wear the garments as many times as we can so that we don't buy new clothes often, don't waste too much of the fabric. We can reuse, and wear it many times.

The brands and the retailer should encourage people to recycle those waste garments. And, some brands can sell these as a second hand garments.  Then if that could not be worn again, the stores should give some incentives to the consumersfor bringing back their waste garments, and then collect it in the stores, in the retail chain.

To avoid those wastes being dumped or incinerated, a collecting system should be built by brands or the retailers. They are the first line to contact the consumer, they can help. Also, they can try to educate the consumer when they bring back their garments.

Effective textile recycling begins with consumer awareness and material sorting. Brands and retailers play a crucial role in educating consumers on textile material differences, proper recycling methods, and incentivizing participation.

A major challenge in textile recycling is separating blended fabrics like polyester-cotton. Emerging chemical recycling processes now enable efficient separation, facilitating improved recycling outcomes. For instance, chemical recycling can break polyester down into its raw monomers, while enzymatic processes selectively degrade cotton into cellulose or sugars. These sugars can then be converted into ethanol for various applications, including fuel additives and sterilization.

By implementing advanced sorting and recycling technologies, companies like FENC are developing innovative solutions to maximize material recovery, enhance sustainability, and reduce textile waste.

Contamination from non-recyclable materials remains one of the major issues in textile recycling. How do challenges related to contamination in recycled textiles affect the quality and usability of recycled materials?

There are still some other non-recyclable materials and also very minor other components in the fabrics. Thus, what we do for nylon or hemps or the other materials is the technology we developed would not touch the nylon or hemp.

 In our chemical recycling process, we must first sort the fabrics into the polyester and cotton streams. The ability to recycle these materials depends on their quality. However, through the process we have developed, we have identified an innovative approach to utilizing non-recyclable materials by converting them into a fuel source. This fuel can be integrated into our recycling process, providing an additional energy source that enhances the energy efficiency of polyester and cotton fabric recycling.

It is crucial to remove even minor amounts of non-recyclable materials, as their presence can significantly impact the quality of the recycled outputs. For instance, if these contaminants are not properly eliminated, the monomers derived from polyester may suffer from quality degradation, making them less suitable for future applications. Similarly, the cellulose or sugars extracted from cotton may be compromised, reducing their potential for reuse in various industries. Therefore, meticulous separation and removal of non-recyclable components are essential to ensuring the production of high-quality recycled materials, ultimately contributing to a more sustainable and efficient recycling system.

Thus, we also developed the biological recycling to recycle cotton. Then the other non-recyclable material will not be degraded and we can recycle it as a fuel for our process again.

Overall, the chemical recycling of fabric waste is an important technology for the sustainability goal of the textile industry and FENC is scaling up the plant to achieve this circular economy.