Stepping up to textile circularity

The feasibility of turning old clothes into new textiles has come under scrutiny recently with sceptics saying the leap from laboratory to commercial scale is fraught with difficulty and is nowhere near economic viability.

But the commercial production of clean polyester chip made from mixed textile inputs is already happening in Japan, where Osaka-based Jeplan depolymerises the equivalent of 4 million t-shirts per year to make 1,000 tonnes of clean polyester for turning back into high-grade fibre.