Living with blends and looking beyond the backyard

Despite the many difficulties of sorting and recycling of post-consumer waste textiles, fibre blends are an indispensable facet of today’s market, and their use may actually increase going forward.

This was one of the key takeaways from the ITMAconnect Sustainability and Circularity webinar of the Innovator Xchange Virtual Edition series. The webinar was chaired by Karla Magruder, founder and president of Accelerating Circularity, the organisation working with multiple companies to drive forward the industry’s transition to textile-to-textile circular systems.

Decisions in design

That blends don’t cause difficulties in recycling was disputed by Annabelle Hutter, managing director of Säntis Textiles. She said that they caused significant problems on her company’s proprietary RCO 100 system for the production of high-quality recycled cotton and questioned whether they need to be used to the extent that they currently are.

“In fashion, complex blends can sometimes be unnecessary, and we are working extensively with designers to make them aware of the problems they cause,” she said. “Often blends can be avoided and it’s about making conscious decisions at the design stage.”

Alan Hudd, founder and CEO at digital dyeing company Alchemie Technology said recyclers and dyeing and finishing companies faced similar difficulties.

“Blends certainly make things more complicated for us too,” he said. “All parameters have a big impact on the quality of coloration and the devil is in the detail. Variability is huge in terms of physical and chemical properties in dyeing, and these properties are changed again in recycled fibres. There is in any case, no such thing as a single polyester and the dye properties change from one fibre to another.”

Jean-Francois Gryspeert, sales and business developer for Belgian sorting and baling technology specialist Valvan, observed that for the textile waste sorter, blends extended to accessories such as buttons, zippers, pocket linings and stitching, which all have to be separated from mixed bales of waste, but working out the percentage of polycotton with NIR (near infrared) technology was relatively easy.

Valvan is currently involved in a major project in the Prato region of Italy involving a supply chain-wide push to establish circular textile manufacturing.

Complexity

In defence of blends, Toby Moss, business development director at Worn Again Technologies, representing EuRIC, the largest industry association of waste and recycling companies in the EU, compared restricting manufacturers to single fibres to asking the art world to only use the colour blue.

“Blends provide a fantastic complexity and wide functionality that we wouldn’t have with a single fibre, or a single dye or finish,” he said. “Today there are seventeen different fibres used in making clothing, some of them natural, but most synthetic, and the synthetics are growing in popularity because they can provide both cost efficiency and functional properties that natural fibres can’t.

“We should be very cautious about saying that the fibres we’ve got today are the best ones or that any single one of them should be chosen to be used exclusively for making clothing. That could send us down a relatively dangerous path in terms of both sustainability and the cost of clothing, which is really important, especially for people in the developing world.”

He cited the example of the workwear industry’s reliance on polycotton blends which are crucial in providing a range of necessary functions with the durability and cost efficiency that pure cotton or pure polyester can’t.

“We need to live with the fact that these blends are going to be with us and get even more complex,” Moss said. “Our job as recycling innovators is to create better solutions so that we can deal with that complexity. At Worn Again our core technologies are about polycotton recycling, but we’re not stopping there. ”

Price levelling

In looking at the broader picture, Jean-Francois Gryspeert observed that the European Union’s ban on the landfilling or incineration of textile waste from January 2025 will oblige the major brands to put their waste feedstocks on the market and this should go some way to levelling up the price difference between virgin and recycled fibres.

“There is so much additional processing involved in recycling fibres which means they are currently much more expensive than either virgin cotton or synthetics, which both have long-established and cost maximised manufacturing chains,” he said. “The introduction of the extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme by the EU will introduce fees to help organise the structure for economical recycling and lower its processing costs as the European recycling industry scales up to meet these new regulatory measures.”

Encouraging legislation

Alan Hudd welcomed the upcoming EU legislation but said that when European governments talked about getting to net zero they were often only looking at their own countries and in this respect were adopting something of a NIMBY – Not In My Backyard – attitude to the problems created by the globalised textile industry.

“We would encourage legislation, and more of it, and especially to stop or to tax the products that we are importing that are causing a lot of pollution somewhere else in the world,” he said. “But bringing about the changes necessary to become a cleantech industry has to be supported by serious investment. We need to be investing US$20 billion every year for the next ten years and that investment needs to be coming from both brands and governments. Realistically, it needs governments to come together because the only way this can really be done is on a global stage with global policies.”

A recording of the webinar is available on ITMAconnect on-demand for subscribers. If you are not a subscriber, register for an ITMAconnect visitor account now for just €25 (plus applicable VAT).

Watch On-demand Now Subscribe to ITMAconnect