Recycling Breakthrough for Clothing Made with Polyamide

SEATTLE (Waste Advantage): When clothes made with polyamide are discarded after people are finished wearing them, they mainly end up polluting the environment. At the same time, however, polyamide cannot simply be dispensed with because it does make textiles more durable and stretchier. For example, conventional women’s stockings and carpets are made almost entirely out of polyamide. When it comes to hats or uniforms, polyamide is usually blended with wool or cotton because this increases their level of comfort when wearing them. Up until now, attempts to recycle clothing have failed because of these blended fibers. This is all the more problematic since the quantities of clothing that contain polyamide are enormous. Taking into account a typical blend of 15 to 20%, the production volume worldwide was 10.8 million metric tons in 2018.

Together with his team, he has developed a new method for recycling clothing that contains polyamide fibers. He explains this process in an interview with Innovation Origins: “You cannot just separate out a textile fiber that contains polyamide in a mechanical process. Although that is possible with plastic. So, there are already several successful recycling technologies for that. Such as the ones for separating polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polyethylene (PE) from bottles. Even clothing fabrics made from recycled polyethylene terephthalate that is extracted from plastic bottles are available nowadays. All the same, there isn’t a system with a fully circular system so far.”

Courtesy: www.wasteadvantage.com