Chemical recycling scales up
Innovation and legislation are driving progress to solve a particularly tricky issue: what to do with the increasing quantities of apparel, new and used, that are discarded every year. The EU is working on directives that will make it more difficult to dispose of textile waste and that may also incentivise the integration of recycled content in new clothes. This context is fuelling funding towards companies whose technologies can recycle blended textiles, carpets, and other complex forms of PET waste. These advanced, molecular or chemical recycling techniques, which broadly mean the same thing, depolymerise, or revert polyester-based textiles back into their original building blocks, are delivering virgin-grade monomers to start a new cycle.
