RE:Spin – A new technology to expand recycling of cellulosic textile fibers

This project intends to develop a new technology to recycle waste textiles. The proposed technology aims to recycle waste textiles by simply dissolving and respinning the old fibers into new ones with similar properties to the starting material. This would eliminate the need to derivatize the cellulose contained in the textile fibers, as current innovators do, which would remove several steps in the recycling process and reduce the amount of waste generated. Moreover, the length of the cellulose polymers would be preserved to a much larger extent, which means that this technology would open the possibility to recycle cotton fibers many more times, as well as recycle cellulose-based fibers with short cellulose polymers, such as viscose fibers.

In short, this technology would allow expanding recycling of cellulose-based fibers through expanding the type of fibers that can be recycled and allowing recycling cotton fibers more times. This expansion in recycling capabilities would allow cellulose-based fibers replacing fossil-based fibers in the textile market to a larger extent without the need to extract more natural resources, which means that this technology would contribute to both an increased circularity and increased bio-based share in the textile market.

Participants

ShareTex AB, Valmet AB, H&M Hennes & Mauritz GBC AB, RISE AB and Lund University Dept. of Chemical Engineering.

Budget & time plan

The project’s total budget is 2 MSEK and the project runs for two years – between November 2022 and November 2024.