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Textile waste is very heterogeneous: textiles are collected for recycling from different sources, and are composed of different fabrics, different dyes, different finishes... Even a simple white T-shirt is often manufactured from multiple materials (for example, cotton fabric panels, polyester thread and an elastic neck). 

Recycling requires careful separation of this mixed waste into relatively pure, single material streams. Even small fractions of contaminants or misidentified textiles can compromise the recycling process, resulting in final products that are of insufficient quality to re-enter textile production. A preliminary analysis of the waste composition can be performed using fast infra-red scanning techniques to identify and sort textile items, similarly to what happens for plastic waste recycling. However, this is not accurate enough to achieve the purity required for a successful recycling process, and is heavily affected by the textile colour, thickness and even age!

In this work package we will develop an analytical pipeline to accurately determine the composition of textile waste samples by breaking the fibres down into their chemical components. We’re particularly interested in synthetics (polyester, nylon, elastane), as these are almost always used in blends with multiple other fibres, complicating their separation, and have the largest market share in textile production globally.