TEXTILE CIRCULAR ECONOMY: ADDRESSING MATERIAL WASTE IN RECYCLING AND PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

The transition to a circular economy in textiles must address the growing environmental challenge of post-consumer textile waste, which exceeds 17 million tons annually in the United States. This study evaluates material loss in mechanically recycling post-consumer apparel and proposes and evaluates a new circularity indicator - total recycled material efficiency. The proposed indicator looks at material losses throughout all the processes or steps of recycling and using recycled inputs in the manufacturing of new products. This indicator contributes to circularity principles by establishing which steps are more or less efficient and thus where to focus material recycling improvement efforts. Experimental efforts were undertaken to create two products from fibers recycled from discarded apparel; felted nonwoven fabric and yarn. Discarded apparel was preprocessed to remove non-fabric components, recycled into fibers using a patent-pending mechanical recycling technology called the Fiber Shredder, and repurposed into batting to make a nonwoven felt and then spun and plied to become yarn. The pre-processing step generated the highest waste, exceeding 30% for nonwoven production and 23-57% for yarn, depending on the input materials. The 100% post-consumer recycled (PCR) wool felted nonwoven fabric and the 85% PCR cotton yarn had the highest recycled material efficiency indicator for their respective product categories. Cotton from bed sheets showed lower losses than rayon from apparel due to fewer non-fabric components requiring removal during pre-processing. There is a need to optimize pre-processing operations required for textile recycling to improve material retention, emphasizing innovations needed to enhance textile circularity and sustainability.