Development of biotechnology for recycling and reuse of wool blended textile waste materials

Abstract

The rapid growth of textile consumption demands greater use of resources and enormous amounts of energy and water for producing virgin materials and processing into textiles. This results in the depletion of natural non-renewable resources and contributes significantly to carbon emissions, which is unsustainable. The new challenge facing the global textiles industry is to develop technologies for upcycling, recycling, and reuse of textile waste to achieve textile circularity. Blended fabrics have proved difficult to recycle due to fibres being intimately blended and the lack of innovation to enable effective separation of different fibre components, so blended textiles waste often end up in either landfill or incineration. Enzyme-based biotechnology has demonstrated its potential to provide innovative solutions to improve textile performance properties and reduce the negative impact of textile production on the environment. In this current research, enzyme-based biotechnology processes were explored for recycling and reuse of wool/synthetics and wool/bast fibre blended fabrics from post-consumer and/or manufacturing waste streams. Individual fibre components were separated and recovered for re-processing back into yarns for fabric production. Bast fibres such as flax and hemp fibres are regarded as sustainable fibres for textiles due to requiring almost no water or pesticides during cultivation. Recycling and reuse of bast fibres from waste textile materials could not only contribute towards diverting land use for other types of farming, saving energy and water from processing, and also meet the increasing demand for the supply of bast fibres for different sectors. The research work also demonstrates the potential to recover dyes from waste textiles and their reuse for textile coloration. These research outcomes demonstrate potential opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of textile production and support the global textile industry transition to a circular system