Improving Resource Efficiency for the Textile Industry

Introduction

A circular economy (CE) approach aims to more efficiently leverage our existing resources to create domestic and sustainable growth and jobs, and ensuring our Nation’s security and economic prosperity. Textile production has increased dramatically over recent decades, particularly with the rise of “fast fashion”. Simultaneously, increased production of synthetic fibers such as polyester and nylon due to their cost-efficiency and performance characteristics (e.g., stretch, durability, shrink resistance) has resulted in a large volume of synthetic fibers in textiles produced today. In the current linear economic model, textile products are made, used, and disposed of, leaving a large fraction of usable materials being wasted, representing a tremendous loss of economic and material value. 

Key resource efficiency challenges facing the textile industry include:

• Collection Infrastructure: The infrastructure and systems for collecting waste textiles are not well established. What does exist is not consistent, convenient, or widespread enough to collect quality (clean, dry) textiles in the quantities needed to retain value.
• Sorting and Grading of Textiles: This process typically relies on expensive manual labor, even though it is not possible to visually identify fiber composition. Fiber content labels may be missing or incorrect, and no harmonized sorting standards or criteria exist, creating more work for downstream markets for waste textiles.
• Commercial-Scale Recycling Processes for Textiles: Commercial-scale processes will be fiber-type dependent; require pure, reliable, high-volume feedstock; and generally cannot process mixed material inputs (fiber blends, which make up a large fraction of textile production). Separating blends and removing dyes, additives, and finishes (e.g., waterproofing, wrinkle-resistant coatings) often requires or generates hazardous substances that create another need for proper disposal. In addition, only limited recycling processes exist for certain fiber types.

Contribution to resource efficiency improvements for textiles

1. Standards Development: Through this work, we seek to identify standards needed to improve resource efficiency for textiles, develop a standards roadmap, and begin standards development efforts to address these needs. A workshop was recently held with ASTM and AATCC to discuss the most needed standards in this field. A workshop report was recently released through ASTM that details some of the needs identified by this community.
2. Improve Chemical & Mechanical Recycling of Textiles: Both chemical and mechanical recycling processes have disadvantages: chemical recycling requires energy and solvents as additional inputs into the system, while mechanical recycling is either highly labor-intensive or the quality/value of the resultant materials is lost, leading to reduced waste efficiency. This advanced mechanical recycling project leverages the intrinsic properties of individual fibers within fiber blends to separate them into fiber fractions without the use of chemicals or high temperatures leading to more pure inputs and higher quality products. Chemical recycling of waste textiles requires an understanding of the impurities in these materials from dyes and finishes. This research project seeks to understand how these impurities can affect the productivity of these recycling processes.
3. Enable Rapid, Efficient Textile Sorting: Current sorting processes are manual and labor intensive. To improve the efficiency of these process, Near Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is one advanced tool that has been identified to automate these processes. However, better reference data is needed to help validate NIR based sorting. To help grow this industry, we continue to build a near-infrared (NIR) reference dataset for textile fibers and blends to enable rapid sorting and identification of textiles for recycling. The first version of this dataset is free and available to download at the NIST Public Data Repository: Near-Infrared Spectra of Origin-defined and Real-world Textiles (NIR-SORT) Dataset Additional updates are planned in 2025.