Chemical textile recycling’s reality check

YORK – Mechanical recycling has a ceiling. Every time a fibre is shredded, opened and respun, it gets shorter and weaker, which is why mechanically recycled cotton is usually blended with 70 – 80% virgin fibre just to hold a yarn together. Chemical recycling promises something better: break the polymer down to its monomers, or dissolve it back to a pure pulp, and you can in theory rebuild a fibre with virgin-equivalent properties, indefinitely.

That promise is why so much investment has piled into the space. It’s also why, in practice, the chemistry is proving so much harder to scale than the pitch decks suggest.