As plastic dominates textile production, recycling sectors are merging and new methods are taking hold. | Sve_M/Shutterstock

This article appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of Plastics Recycling Update. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

A few generations ago, the fate of end-of-life clothing would have been an unlikely subject in a plastics recycling trade journal.

In 1960, natural fibers dominated global production, with cotton making up half of all textile fibers produced that year, according to data from textile analysis firm The Fiber Year, with other natural or cellulose-based fibers like linen, rayon and wool rounding out the mix. Synthetic fibers made up just 3% of global textile fiber produced that year.

The percentages have flipped dramatically since then. In 2023, synthetic materials including polyester, which is made from PET, and polyamide — nylon — made up a whopping 68% of global textile fiber production, while cotton had fallen to 21%.

Besides the material shift, the sheer growth of clothing production is staggering: Global textile manufacturing increased nearly sevenfold from an estimated 20 million metric tons annually in 1960 to 130 million metric tons in 2023.

With the increases come a host of new considerations. End-of-life textile management is far from a new concept, spanning a long history of secondhand clothing use, repurposing and mechanical recycling. And even in the synthetic space, recycled polyester clothing has been produced — typically using mechanically recycled PET bottles — for decades. Its share of overall polyester fabric grew from 4% in 2010 to 14% in 2020, according to the nonprofit Textile Exchange, which publishes annual textile data.

But the growth in new polyester production is eclipsing the increase in mechanically recycled polyester use: After recycled polyester production’s share of overall polyester use peaked at close to 15% in 2021, it fell back to 12.5% in 2023.

Amid these challenges and others, chemical recycling, the group of technologies that process a plastic down to its basic components, has emerged as what industry stakeholders say is a promising tool to cut down on one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the world. Chemically processing textiles is a recycling sector in its infancy, but many in the field are optimistic it can complement mechanical recycling and reuse models.

“Given the complications associated with mechanical recycling of textiles, alternative recycling technologies, such as chemical recycling, are promising thanks to their capacity to recycle blended textile waste,” the Textile Exchange wrote in a 2024 report. “They are designed to handle colorants, additives, and finishing materials, and are also able to produce recycled textile fibers with performance capabilities substantially equivalent to virgin polyester fibers.”

A long textile management history

Long before the current push for advanced processing methods, consumers have frequently followed the materials management hierarchy, which prioritizes reuse and repurposing above recycling, when faced with textile waste management.

“First they would wear, wear, wear, until it literally couldn’t be worn anymore,” said Marisa Adler, a senior consultant at Resource Recycling Systems and founder of the firm’s Textile Circularity Practice. “Then they would rip it up and just use it as cleaning rags in their home. And then they would finally throw it away.”

Collecting rags from households for reuse, repurposing or recycling has been an occupation for centuries, with the Textile Recycling Association, a U.K.-based industry group, tracing the history of rag collectors at least back to the Roman Empire.

It was an early profession in the U.S. as well, Adler explained, and has long helped to offset the need for virgin materials and paper to go into rag production.

“They were raggers: They’d go around and they would collect everyone’s old rags, and they would cut it up and sell it as a wiping material,” she said. “And that industry has evolved over time, and it’s still a very active and important industry.”

Mechanical recycling, which RRS defines as the physical form of recycling textiles in which fiber is cut, shredded, garnetted (pulled apart), melted or extruded for new manufacturing, also has a long global history.

The Italian city of Prato is renowned for generations of wool recycling expertise. The process involves pulling apart used wool clothing and re-spinning the wool back into a usable yarn. It uses textiles as feedstock and produces yarn for new textiles at the end. There are similar processes for cotton as well.

Another global textile recycling hub is Panipat, India, which is known for what’s called “shoddy” recycling, a mechanical process by which textiles are shredded, pulped and remanufactured into blankets, insulation and other types of stuffing and padding. That’s distinct from thread-to-thread processes in part because of the technical constraints of re-spinning yarn.

“There is just a maximum number of cycles you can go through, because the natural cellulosic fibers become shorter and shorter and they’re harder to spin, so it’s lower quality,” Adler said. “So you need a really good, pure, high, high-quality input in order to do a mechanical yarn-to-yarn recycling process, which is why it is not more common now.”

With cotton, for example, the recycled yarn often produces a lower quality output, and so it usually has to be spun with virgin cotton to make a usable yarn out the back end, Adler said.
“It has that high-quality input requirement,” she added. “Not a lot of textiles meet that, especially today.”

Mechanical polyester recycling challenges

Mechanical recycling is more complicated for synthetic and blended fabrics. As the Textile Exchange noted in a report last year, “mechanical recycling requires clean textile inputs free from contaminants, and it is difficult to process textiles containing more than one material type.” Pulling apart and separating fabrics by their component material is costly and labor-intensive, the group added.

That’s partially why nearly all of the mechanically recycled polyester used in new textiles comes from PET bottles rather than textiles, and it’s also contributing to industry interest in chemical recycling.

“In recent years, the demand for recycled bottle feedstock from the packaging industry in the U.S. has surpassed that of the textile industry,” RRS and the organization Fashion for Good wrote in a 2024 report titled “Sorting for Circularity USA.” They added that the shift “can largely be attributed to legislation mandating minimum recycled content rates for packaging.”

Put simply, recycled PET bottles are a hot commodity for the packaging industry, and companies looking to source PET bottles for textiles have “faced challenges due to higher prices and increased competition for limited supply.”

Fast fashion’s role

Another ingredient in the mix is the rise of fast fashion, which business analysis firm McKinsey defined as a portion of the clothing sector focused on “ultralow prices and condensed production cycles,” aiming to deliver “new styles to customers at a record pace.”

A recent briefing from the U.S. Government Accountability Office to lawmakers last year was blunt: “First introduced around 2000, the fast fashion business model produces textiles at lower cost and quality, and decreased durability. Under this model, trends change frequently, consumers buy textiles many times per year, and they dispose of textiles after using them for a short period of time.”

In the fast fashion industry and its recent ultra-fast fashion successor, the percentage of plastic feedstock is often higher than global textile averages. For instance, Singapore-headquartered fast fashion giant Shein in 2023 reported using polyester for over 75% of the company’s fiber feedstock, with the remainder consisting of cotton, viscose, spandex, polyamide and other materials. The company is frequently cited as the largest operating in the fast fashion space.

The Textile Exchange, in a comprehensive report on synthetic textile recycling issued last year, cautioned that short of a dramatic reduction in production and consumer buying trends, moving away from polyester would be virtually impossible.

“We must also be aware of the potential unintended consequences associated with solely relying on natural fibers for apparel and textiles,” the group wrote. “At current production rates, simply shifting from one material category to another would likely lead to the accelerated depletion of natural ecosystems.”

Additionally, during a talk at Goodwill’s first-ever Sustainability Summit last year, the CEO of emerging textile recycling firm Reju noted the material’s water resistance, light weight, machine washability and durability mean abandoning it is impossible.

“We can’t live without it, unfortunately, for the foreseeable future,” Patrik Frisk said at the event. “It’s an amazing product that we need to understand how to live with in a much smarter way.”

Increasingly, the road to that “smarter way” is paved with chemical recycling.

Chemical recycling takes several routes

In general, chemical recycling refers to a “depolymerization” process that uses one of several technologies to chemically disassemble polymer plastics into their monomer components. Those monomers can then be used to produce new resin.

Chemical recycling encompasses many technical processes. Glycolysis, for example, is the most commonly used for polyester, according to the Textile Exchange, and involves combining the polyester material with the chemical reactant glycol at high temperatures, to produce BHET, which stands for bis (hydroxyethylene) terephthalate.

Glycolysis and other depolymerization technologies can be used to produce what proponents describe as virgin-like output resins. They do have some limitations, the Sorting for Circularity USA report noted last year, including high energy use and requirements for 90% or greater purity from the given input fiber.

One highly-watched entrant to the textile chemical recycling space is Reju, an emerging German-headquartered company that says it is “unlocking the infinite possibilities of textile waste.” The company has described its process as using a textile-to-textile “regeneration” technology.

Reju was not available for an interview by press time, but the company was recently
featured by Sourcing Journal, which confirmed it is using a glycolysis process to produce BHET. The journal reported that, “heated up to temperatures of up to 250 degrees Celsius (482 degrees Fahrenheit), ethylene glycol and an unnamed volatile catalyst ‘decompose’ the polyester into its constituent monomers, creating a BHET slurry that can be filtered and purified of dyestuffs and other contaminants before it’s cooled, crystallized and dried back into solid form.”

The company opened a demonstration plant in Germany last fall and this year formed a supply partnership with a French consortium of textile companies to source post-consumer materials. Reju is also collaborating with Goodwill and WM in the U.S., announcing last fall that the group is planning “to develop a collaborative model for regional textile collection, sortation, reuse and recycling that is intended to divert more nonwearable textile materials from the waste stream.”

Collection infrastructure lacking

In 2018, the U.S. generated an estimated 17 million tons of end-of-life textiles, close to 6% of the entire municipal solid waste stream. Of that amount, 2.5 million tons were recycled, a 14.7% recycling rate. That puts textiles significantly behind common streams like paper and paperboard (68%), PET and HDPE bottles and jars (29% each) and glass (31%).

Of course, the latter materials have the substantial benefit of common curbside collection and, depending on the U.S. state, deposit return systems.

Pilot projects like the planned collaboration from Goodwill, Reju and WM could help establish a similar collection system for textiles. Reju hinted at ambitious U.S. plans in announcing it, saying the company anticipates developing a textile chemical recycling plant that would be fed by materials collected by Goodwill and WM.

Emerging regulations could also help improve collection infrastructure. California lawmakers in 2024 passed the nation’s first extended producer responsibility law covering textiles. The Responsible Textile Recovery Act took effect Jan. 1, kicking off a rulemaking process that will see textile manufacturers begin funding and facilitating recycling of their products in California within the next five years.

Although it’s the first U.S. effort, it comes after well-established EPR policies elsewhere in the world, including in France, where the regulation launched in 2007. Collection options grew substantially in France afterward, according to a 2018 overview published by the International Solid Waste Association, with hundreds of organizations providing on-street container, door-to-door services and textile banks at private businesses.

Public consciousness aroused

It’s difficult to identify an inflection point in the moment, when an emerging industry like the modern textile recycling sector explodes into a thriving and sustaining business. The introduction of chemical recycling will certainly bring skepticism, as it has drawn elsewhere in the plastics recycling space, and chemical recycling has yet to scale up fully in the plastics recycling industry, despite significant momentum in recent years.

But emerging legislation, the smattering of startup companies entering the space, the backing of some major producers and the frequent mainstream media coverage of clothing’s environmental impacts suggest end-of-life textile management is an issue that’s in the public consciousness in a new way.

“I think the other reason it’s become a prominent topic of conversation is just because it’s a product that touches everybody’s lives,” said Adler, who has been focused in the textile recycling space for over eight years. “It has such deep, emotional ties — you know, we express ourselves through fashion.”

Infobox: Textile chemical recycling developments

A variety of clothing companies and other organizations are getting in on chemical recycling.

• Patagonia: Long a user of mechanically recycled polyester, clothing giant Patagonia has been experimenting with chemical recycling technologies of late, including with Japanese firm Jeplan, which commercialized a glycolysis process to handle PET and post-consumer polyester textiles. For the fall 2024 line of Patagonia’s “Better Sweater” collection, the company reported using 48,000 pounds of Jeplan’s post-industrial chemically recycled polyester.
• H&M: Fast-fashion giant H&M in 2024 announced the launch of its joint-venture Syre, which “aims to rapidly scale textile-to-textile recycling of polyester and contribute to a more sustainable textile industry.” In October 2024, Syre announced it is establishing a textile chemical recycling plant in collaboration with polyester producer Selenis, in Cedar Creek, North Carolina, with plans to be operational in mid-2025 and produce 10,000 metric tons per year of chemically recycled polyester.
• University of Delaware: The university’s Center for Plastics Innovation studied a method of modified glycolysis that is faster and better suited for mixed textiles than traditional chemical recycling processes. In a July 2024 report published in Scientific Advances, the team described a “microwave-assisted” glycolysis that produced rapid delpolymerization of polyester and spandex into their monomers in just 15 minutes while also leaving intact any cotton and nylon that was in the textiles.
• Shein: The global direct-to-consumer clothing giant in January announced it has developed a chemical recycling technology to process polyester that can use both post-consumer and post-industrial polyester and both end-of-life textiles and other sources like PET bottles. The company plans to start up a facility in June to produce 6.6 million pounds of chemically recycled polyester per year, with assistance from a group of selected fiber manufacturers. The site hasn’t been announced.
• Eastman: Chemical recycling projects outside the textile space are also targeting PET packaging that is less frequently mechanically recycled, and the resulting resin could go into new textiles, RRS noted in the Collecting for Circularity USA report. Chemical giant Eastman is one example; the company in 2024 began sourcing PET thermoforms from curbside recycling programs and processing them at a methanolysis plant in Tennessee. Eastman has also processed post-consumer textiles on a pilot basis there.