Textile Waste Recycling Technologies and Sustainable Practices

Global textile production has surged in recent decades, driven by fast fashion and expanding consumer markets, resulting in tens of millions of tonnes of post-use textiles being incinerated or landfilled each year. Recycling technologies span mechanical, chemical and biological approaches, often deployed in combination to maximise resource recovery. Mechanical recycling involves shredding fabrics into fibres for re-spinning or non-woven products but is limited by fibre shortening and mixed-fibre compositions. Chemical recycling employs processes such as hydrolysis, glycolysis, ammonolysis and pyrolysis to depolymerise synthetic and cellulosic polymers into monomers or oligomers that can be re-polymerised into new materials. Biological routes, including enzymatic hydrolysis and fermentation, offer selective and mild-condition alternatives that can valorise cellulosic fractions and protein-based fibres. Emerging advances in spectroscopic sorting, green solvents and ionic liquids enable selective dissolution and fractionation of blended textiles, while integration with digital tools such as the Internet of Things enhances automated sorting precision. Life-cycle assessments consistently indicate that closed-loop recycling systems—designed from material choice through end-of-life recovery—yield substantial reductions in energy use, greenhouse-gas emissions and water consumption, underpinning the transition towards a circular textile economy.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have demonstrated scalable sequential chemical recycling of mixed cotton-polyester textiles through an acid hydrolysis step followed by polyester glycolysis. In this process, concentrated hydrochloric acid under ambient conditions converts the cotton fraction into glucose with high molar yield, enabling facile separation of residual polyester. Subsequent glycolysis of the polyester residue yields high-purity bis(2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalate, closing the loop on synthetic polymer recovery. Pilot-scale trials have confirmed the process’s scalability from millilitre reactors to 230-litre systems, illustrating potential for industrial deployment with minimal loss of efficiency. This dual-stage approach addresses the challenge of blended textiles and provides a blueprint for high-yield recovery of both natural and synthetic fibres in a single flow.

Textile Waste Recycling Technologies and Sustainable Practices publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in textile waste recycling technologies and sustainable practices across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Hydrolysis: Cleavage of polymer chains by reaction with water, often acid- or base-catalysed, yielding monomeric sugars or acids from cellulosic materials.

Glycolysis: Chemical depolymerisation of polyesters using diols to break ester bonds and recover monomeric or oligomeric units for repolymerisation.

Ionic liquids: Low-melting organic salts employed as green solvents for selective dissolution of polymers, facilitating efficient fractionation of blended textiles.

Enzymatic deconstruction: Use of specific enzymes (e.g., cellulases, proteases) to cleave natural polymer chains under mild conditions, yielding biobased monomers.

Closed-loop recycling: Integrated system design in which post-consumer materials are recovered and reused to regenerate products of equivalent quality, minimising virgin resource demand.

References

1. Polycotton waste textile recycling by sequential hydrolysis and glycolysis. Nature Communications (2025).
2. Possibility Routes for Textile Recycling Technology. Polymers (2021).
3. Mechanical, chemical, biological: Moving towards closed-loop bio-based recycling in a circular economy of sustainable textiles. Journal of Cleaner Production (2021).
4. Recent advances in recycling technologies for waste textile fabrics: a review. Textile Research Journal (2023).
5. Transforming textile wastes into biobased building blocks via enzymatic hydrolysis: A review of key challenges and opportunities. Cleaner and Circular Bioeconomy (2022).
6. Employment of conventional and flash pyrolysis for biomass wastes from the textile industry with sustainable prospects. Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis (2023).