[ Technical Textiles - Worn Again launches first recycling pilot plant.]

Worn Again launches first recycling pilot plant.

Written by John Mowbray.

Published: 21 January 2020.

WILTON – Worn Again has advanced industry efforts to replace the use of virgin materials in textiles with the commissioning of its first pilot-scale facility that can separate, decontaminate and then extract polyester (PET) and cellulose from mixed fabric waste.

The step up from the laboratory to the new pilot-scale facility is significant, as it now allows the company to refine and optimise its production process prior to further scaling up; as well as enabling it to make meaningful amounts of both recycled PET and cellulosic pulp for its partners to test and evaluate.

During a tour of the new polymer recycling facility, last week at the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) in Wilton, near Redcar, UK, Cyndi Rhoades, Founder of Worn Again Technologies told Ecotextile News: “The new pilot plant brings us much closer to commercialisation of our technology and its location at the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) in Wilton gives us access to world-leading chemical engineering expertise for which this region is noted.”

Located on Teeside, the Wilton site is one of the largest chemical R&D sites in Europe – built on the site of the former multinational ICI Chemicals.

A new pilot-scale chemical facility unveiled in the UK could kick-off a new era in textile-to-textile recycling if it can perfect a proprietary process that takes mixed textile cotton and polyester waste and converts it to virgin grade resin and industry-standard cellulosic pulp for making new textile fibres.
Inside Guide to Cotton & Sustainability 2020.

As well as using non-reusable textiles as a feedstock, the process can also use plastic bottles and packaging – although these two raw materials are now being eagerly sought after by both the beverage and plastics sectors.

“It is exciting to have progressed our developments from lab to plant,” added Rhoades. “While there is still a long road ahead, it’s the next tangible step getting us closer to a scalable, commercially viable industrial process that will enable the move away from using finite virgin resources to the circularity of raw materials.”

Moving away from a ‘glassware’ laboratory process, which resulted in small amounts of the end product, the new pilot plant “can produce kilos of clean polymer per batch with process times of around 2.5 hours for polyester,” said Nick Ryan, technical director at Worn Again.

Essentially, the new pilot plant is designed to generate data and further technical knowledge to validate and optimise the process, improve yields, and evaluate the quality of the end product to “ensure it’s equal to existing virgin grade materials derived from wood or petrochemicals that are used to manufacture textile fibres,” said Ryan.

“It will allow us to confirm and further optimise the different steps in the process in the one unit, accelerating our engineering development to the next step of a demonstrator plant,” he confirmed.

It’s at this stage, the company can then move into full product testing with its partners. The company is backed by investors such as H&M Group, Sulzer Chemtech, garment supplier Himes Corporation, Directex – a textiles supplier – and also has the support of partners such as Kering, ASICS Europe, Sympatex, Dibella and Dhana.

We’ll have a more in-depth, exclusive story on this in our next printed edition of Ecotextile News – out on 4th February.

Source:

https://www.ecotextile.com/2020012125560/materials-production-news/worn-again-launches-first-recycling-pilot-plant.html