11. Aug 2025
Chemical recycling innovation for textiles – preview
It is becoming harder and harder to ignore the environmental costs of textiles, and demand is still growing by leaps and bounds each year.
Textile recycling has vexed researchers and the industry, but it is a problem that must be solved, said University of Nebraska–Lincoln researcher Yiqi Yang. He has developed a first-of-its-kind technology for fibre-to-fibre, or chemical, recycling that successfully removes dyes, separates natural and synthetic blends and creates high-quality fibres.
“In the last 20 years, the total fibre production has doubled”, said Yang, Charles Bessey Professor in Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design and Biological Systems Engineering. “Right now, we consume more than 125 million tonnes of fibres per year. We cannot grow more natural fibres or raise more sheep. That’s not realistic, so we’re using more synthetic fibres, but the issue there is the ramification of nondegradable microparticles. “If you can reuse fibres once or twice, that will be a huge reduction on the demand for new fibres and textile materials.”
Textile recycling exists, but it is limited mostly to breaking down textiles into fibres for uses in other products. Garment-to-garment recycling, or upcycling, is very limited and cannot be done on an industrialized scale. Yarn-to-yarn, or mechanical, recycling is available, but the process is destructive and requires adding more than 50% of virgin fibres to make usable yarns.
Fibre-to-fibre recycling has been difficult to achieve, if not impossible, because of dyes and textile blends. Yang and an interdisciplinary team, including doctoral student Yuanyi Shao, developed an aqueous system technology that produces high-quality fibres.
“Dyes are designed to have strong affinity to fibres for excellent colourfastness, so it is difficult to remove the dyes, and what we have done, first in the world, is to find a way to remove the dyes, without damaging the dyes or the fibre polymers”, Yang said. “It not only recycles the fibres successfully, but also recycles the solvents and dyes used in the process.”
Yang is pursuing a patent for the technology and has published a series of articles demonstrating the successful application of the technology on many fibres, from cotton and cotton-polyester blends to acrylics and wools – even carpet. Yang’s latest paper, published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling, applies the technology to used denim and shows that the system can successfully remove vat dyes from textiles, and to produce artificial cellulosic fibres with properties better than that from the artificial fibres using wood pulp. The research has also shown that the process is economically viable and scalable.
“Using our technology, you can recycle fibres from any textiles cost effectively, with excellent properties”, Yang said. “Everything we did was having large-scale production in mind. Of course, we have to have industry interest because the industrial application requires heavy capital investment.”
Yang’s research team aims to minimize the environmental costs and increase the sustainability of the textile industry, with attention paid to two avenues: improving recycling, and creating new textiles from agricultural waste, such as chicken feathers.
“I just don't see the future without these two choices that we are working on,” Yang said. “We need to find new solutions to make more fibres and then recycle what we have. Without the two, we cannot meet the demands.” AT
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