Polyester pretreatment slashes costs and boosts material recovery
When conventional PET recycling is applied to textiles, preprocessing becomes both a major cost driver and a major source of material loss. Rewin’s patented polyester pretreatment reactor changes this equation, enabling low recycling cost and high resource utilization from each ton of textile waste.
The demand for recycled polyester is growing rapidly, but today’s textile-to-textile recycling chains are often held back by the way feedstock needs to be prepared. Cutting, shredding, detrimming, removing hard parts and compacting or agglomeration are all standard steps when PET plastic recycling processes are adapted to textiles – and they come at a high price. Textile Exchange and other industry sources estimate that preprocessing alone can reach around €700 per ton of textiles, eroding margins before the actual recycling even starts.
Recent findings from initiatives such as ACT UK also point to a second challenge: yield. Large fractions of textiles are lost in trim and hard-part removal, meaning that recyclers can lose roughly half of the original textile material during these early stages. In practice, this turns preprocessing into a double burden, it is both expensive and wasteful.
- Preprocessing has been a blind spot in textile recycling – it is both costly and wasteful. With our pretreatment reactor, we can skip most of those steps, keep far more polyester in the loop and still meet industry specifications, says Anders Arkell Chief Technology Officer at Rewin.
A patented reactor that bypasses high-cost preprocessing
One of the key features of Rewin’s polyester recycling process is a patented textile pretreatment reactor for polyester dissolution. Instead of relying on extensive mechanical preprocessing, textiles are introduced into a chemical reactor where the polyester is selectively dissolved, while inert fibers, trims and hard parts remain undissolved.
These non-polyester components are then extracted via solid-liquid separation, allowing them to be removed without having to cut or shred them away in advance. The result is a streamlined pretreatment step that can handle complex blends, printed textiles, hard parts and varying input qualities, without the traditional cost and loss associated with manual or mechanical disassembly.
Low recycling cost and high resource utilization
By eliminating most of the cutting, shredding, detrimming and hard-part removal, Rewin’s pretreatment technology significantly reduces the cost of preparing textiles for recycling. At the same time, much more of the original polyester is retained in the process, addressing the yield losses highlighted in recent industry studies.
- For textile-to-textile recycling to scale, it must make sense both technically and economically. Reducing preprocessing cost while increasing yield is exactly what our technology is built to deliver, says Anders Arkell.
- The textile recycling industry has acknowledged both the preprocessing challenge and our groundbreaking technology to address it. We are now in discussions with several potential partners about licensing this solution to accelerate textile recycling, Anders Arkell states.
This combination of lower preprocessing cost and higher polyester recovery enables a truly cost-effective recycling route with high resource utilization. With its breakthrough pretreatment reactor at the core, Rewin is turning one of the biggest bottlenecks in textile recycling into a value-creating step, paving the way for large-scale, genuine textile-to-textile polyester circularity.