textile recycling

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the collection, sorting, processing, and conversion of used or waste textiles — including clothing, household linens, industrial fabrics, and fibre offcuts — into reusable materials or new products, diverting them from landfill and reducing the need for virgin fibre production; textile recycling takes several forms: mechanical recycling shreds fibres into raw material for lower-grade products such as insulation and industrial rags; chemical recycling dissolves and reconstitutes fibres to produce new textile-grade yarns; and reuse through second-hand markets extends the life of garments without reprocessing; textile recycling is complicated by the prevalence of blended fabrics — polyester-cotton mixtures, for example — which are difficult to separate into pure fibre streams, and by the contamination of collected garments with non-textile materials; scaling chemical recycling of blended fibres is considered a crucial technological challenge for the fashion industry's decarbonisation