PROSPECTIVE LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT OF NONWOVEN MAT MANUFACTURING: COMPARING PRE-CONSUMER WOOD WASTE FIBERS TO POST-CONSUMER RECYCLED APPAREL FIBERS

The apparel industry’s substantial contribution to increasing Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) from discarded apparel through fast fashion approaches necessitates exploring sustainable alternatives. Over the past fifty years, throwing away textiles has risen four times as fast as MSW generation rates in the U.S. This study examines the environmental impact of an existing nonwoven mat manufacturer that uses pre-consumer wood waste to make fiber for nonwoven mats with a post-consumer recycled apparel alternative. This alternative, the Fiber Shredder, a lab-scale innovative mechanical textile recycling technology, takes discarded apparel and turns it into valuable fiber. The recycled cotton fiber produced by the Fiber Shredder from discarded apparel is long enough to manufacture new nonwoven textiles. The final products, nonwoven mats, are intended for landscaping purposes and thus use biodegradable fibers. The novel mechanical textile recycling technology to create fibers from discarded apparel, the Fiber Shredder, developed at the University of Minnesota Duluth, is scaled up theoretically to compare its potential impact upon commercialization to an existing industrial process that creates wood fibers from waste wood. A prospective Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) compared the environmental impacts of three options for manufacturing nonwoven mats; (A) pre-consumer waste wood fibers, (B) current lab scale post-consumer recycled cotton fibers from the Fiber Shredder and (C) post-consumer recycled cotton fibers from the scaled up Fiber Shredder. This LCA encompasses emissions, energy usage, and materials from the acquisition of raw materials through the production processes or cradle-to-gate. The results show that although the lab-scale Fiber Shredder has higher environmental impacts than the commercial nonwoven manufacturer, scaling up the Fiber Shredder will lead to reduced impacts. However, the scaled-up Fiber Shredder still needs improvement in electricity consumption and speed of production to be able to match the current commercially available technology. The limitations of this study involve simplifying assumptions such as neglecting packaging during shipping, energy consumption for apparel sorting and notion removal, and potential microplastics generation. In conclusion, transitioning to post-consumer apparel recycling holds promise but requires careful consideration of energy usage for scalability of the Fiber Shredder. This study underscores the importance of prospective LCA to optimize the design of emerging recycling technologies for sustainable production.