Environmental Prospects for Mixed Textile Recycling in Sweden
Journal article, 2019

The production of cotton and other fibers causes excessive resource use and environmental impacts, and the deployment of these fibers in "fast fashion" is creating large masses of textile waste. Therefore, various industrial researchers are attempting to develop systems to recycle cellulosic materials. This is a challenging undertaking because of the need to handle mixed waste streams. Alkaline hydrolysis has been suggested as a useful textile recycling process, but its sustainability credentials have not been fully examined via life cycle assessment. The aim of this article is to provide such an examination and to guide process developers by scaling up results from recent laboratory work to a small-scale industrial facility. The results indicate that the recycling process is promising from an environmental point of view. The key issue controlling the relative environmental performance of the recycling system in comparison to a single-use benchmark is how the process for converting recovered cotton into a cellulosic fiber is performed. A fully integrated viscose production system or a system that makes one of the newer cellulosic fibers (e.g., lyocell) from the recovered cotton will improve the performance of the recycling system relative to its alternatives.

Cotton

Polyester

Alkaline hydrolysis

Life cycle assessment

Fiber recycling

Chemical recycling

Author

Gregory Peters

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Environmental Systems Analysis

Gustav A Sandin

RISE Research Institutes of Sweden

Björn Spak

RISE Research Institutes of Sweden

ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering

2168-0485 (eISSN)

Vol. 7 13 11682-11690

Subject Categories

Renewable Bioenergy Research

Other Environmental Engineering

Environmental Management

Environmental Sciences

DOI

10.1021/acssuschemeng.9b01742

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7/5/2024 1