In a development that suggests the fashion industry might be slightly less doomed than previously thought, a consortium of companies has successfully demonstrated that your old polyester shirts can be turned into new polyester shirts at an industrial scale.
The test was conducted by JEPLAN at a facility with an annual capacity of 1,000 tonnes, using the Rewind PET process developed by Axens, IFPEN, and JEPLAN. The raw material? Post-consumer textiles collected from French public collection systems, which were converted into BHET - the base monomer that eventually becomes the polyester yarns, fabrics, and garments you'll probably buy, wear a few times, and then wonder what to do with.
According to a joint statement from the companies, the test proves that textile-to-textile (T2T) recycling of post-consumer PET can be achieved at a significant scale under industrial operating conditions. The resulting recycled polyester is intended for sportswear, home furnishings like upholstery and curtains, and selected luxury textile applications - because even high-end fashion is apparently not above wearing someone else's discarded fibers.
The project enables circular polyester loops within the industry, which is a fancy way of saying it lets manufacturers swap out fossil-based raw materials for recycled equivalents at existing polyester production sites worldwide. The Rewind PET technology has already been commercialized for all PET packaging, including food-contact applications, so now it's officially validated for textiles too.
IFPEN and JEPLAN have granted Axens an exclusive worldwide license to offer the process to industrial players looking to establish local or regional textile-to-textile loops. As textile waste volumes continue to rise and textile-to-textile recycling remains stubbornly limited, this demonstration offers evidence that circular production of polyester from post-consumer textiles is now possible on a significant scale.
The technology allows manufacturers to reduce dependence on virgin materials and integrate into global recycling strategies, providing a direct link for reintroducing used textiles back into the value chain - which might have some impact on carbon emissions and costs, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Axens CEO and chairman Quentin Debuisschert summed it up: "Science, scale-up engineering and operational expertise come together to demonstrate the performance of the Rewind PET process developed by IFPEN, JEPLAN and Axens. Axens and its partners thus demonstrate the robustness, stability and reproducibility of a cutting-edge recycling technology specifically designed to promote the closed loop circularity of textile polyester."
In other words: they've figured out how to make new clothes from old clothes. Now if only someone could figure out how to make people stop buying so many clothes in the first place.