A pilot-scale bioreactor will use enzymes to separate wool from polyester and other synthetic fibres in blended fabrics, turning mixed textile waste into reusable raw materials. Most clothing today is made from fabric blends—wool mixed with nylon, cotton blended with polyester—that cannot be recycled by conventional methods. These mixed-fibre textiles end up in landfill or incinerators, wasting valuable resources. The problem is not a lack of recycling infrastructure but a fundamental inability to separate the different fibre types without damaging them. This project builds on earlier enzyme-based work to solve that separation bottleneck. If the bioreactor works at pilot scale, the process could recover three products from waste wool blends: clean wool fibres for respinning into new yarn, dye protein powders for recolouring fabrics, and wool protein for other commercial uses. A spinout company could commercialise the technology. For the textile sector, this would reduce demand for virgin fibres, cut water and energy use, and divert blended fabrics from landfill. The environmental assessment will quantify whether the process saves more resources than it consumes.
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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. Fabric blends constructed with a combination of two or more types of different fibres, from either manufacturing or end-of-life waste-streams, have proven difficult to recycle. This is mainly due to limitations in textile recycling and a lack of innovation to enable effective separation of different fibre components. As a result, blended textiles at end-of-life are often sent either to landfill or for incineration. Project ENZBIOTEX funded by the BBSRC call: “Towards a circular bioeconomy for technology-relevant metals and textiles” focussed on exploring enzyme-based biotechnologies to recover valuable resources from wool blended fabrics for recycling and reuse to support the textile sector’s transition towards circularity. Based on the significant outcomes from the ENZBIOTEX project, this follow-on project aims to design a prototype bioreactor and optimise the enzyme bioprocess for scaling-up the separation of different fibre components from wool blended fabrics, resulting in the remanufacturing and reuse of the recovered fibres and dyes to produce new textile materials and products. The proposed project will establish a process system at pilot scale to include the collection of waste textile materials, sorting, rag opening and shredding, enzymatic fibre separation and remanufacture of the recovered fibres and dyes for achieving textile circularity. This will enable a commercial set up for textile recycling and reuse and the potential for a spinout company to produce recycled materials including fibres, dyes and wool protein for commercial uses. Objectives: to identify and classify post-consumer and post-manufacturing wool blended fabric waste from textile waste streams; to design a bioreactor and scale-up the enzyme bioprocess for fibre separation of waste wool blended fabrics; to recover wool proteins and dyes from bioprocessing through centrifugation, filtration or precipitation; to produce and characterise dye protein powders for commercial wool colouration applications: dyeing and printing; to assess environmental impact and economic benefit of the pilot bioprocesses, recycled dyes, and fibres; to develop strategies for commercial implementation and marketing of the recovered fibres, dye protein powders, and applications. Recycling and reuse of bast fibres and synthetic fibres from blended fabrics, and dyes from dyed wool fibres could reduce demands for virgin materials, resulting in lowering competition as a non-food crop for land use, and reduce the use of non-renewable resources. Transitioning from a linear to a circular economy system of blended textile materials could save water, energy and reduce the use of chemicals for processing new materials. Recycled fibres could be re-spun into new yarn to make new fabrics, and recovered dyes could be used again for colouration of wool, silk and nylon fibres or fabrics. The potential would divert waste away from landfill and incinerators to achieve a circular textile economy.
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