The world's first demonstration plant for recycling polyester-spandex blended fabrics officially began production on September 19, 2024, at the Guoke New Materials Innovation Base in Shaoxing, Zhejiang. The operator is Zhejiang Aminuo New Materials Co., Ltd. The plant marks the transition from laboratory to industrialization, with technology capable of completely separating and recycling polyester and spandex from blended fabrics, achieving recovery rates exceeding 99% for each fiber component.

Key Points

  • The demonstration plant started production on September 19, 2024, in Shaoxing, and is the world's first recycling plant for polyester-spandex blended fabrics.
  • Aminuo uses biomimetic enzyme-targeted catalysis technology to separate polyester and spandex below 90°C, with recovery rates over 99%.
  • A 10,000-ton-scale polyester blend fabric recycling plant is in the preparation stage, with plans to further expand capacity.

Mao Debin, founder and CEO of Aminuo, said he had waited four years for this day. The company's technical team successfully developed biomimetic enzyme-targeted catalysis technology in October 2021, which can precisely identify and depolymerize polyester into monomers under mild conditions below 90°C, completely separating it from spandex. The separated spandex is re-spun into recycled spandex, and the polyester monomers are purified and re-polymerized into polyester, both of which can be used for textile fibers. This is the first time globally that complete separation and circular recycling of spandex and polyester fibers have been achieved.

Over the following three years, the team achieved breakthroughs in recycling technology for polyester-cotton, polyester-wool, and polyester-cotton-spandex blends, and completed kilogram-scale trials, with recovery rates for each fiber component exceeding 99%. Among them, the polyester-cotton-spandex blend was the world's first to achieve complete closed-loop recycling of a three-fiber blended fabric. Mao Debin estimates that compared to virgin spandex production technology, producing a 100-gram garment containing 10% spandex with Aminuo's solution can reduce carbon emissions by about 60%. The entire production process is fully enclosed and waterless, generating no industrial wastewater or waste gas.

Currently, Aminuo is the world's first company to master chemical recycling technology for four major types of blended fabrics: polyester-spandex, polyester-cotton, polyester-wool, and polyester-cotton-spandex. Zhao Kai, executive vice president of the China Circular Economy Association, commented that the project is a practice of fine sorting and precise classification of waste textiles, improving recycling and high-value utilization rates.

From an industrial chain perspective, Aminuo receives recycled garments from clothing recycling companies and brand apparel, as well as scraps from garment manufacturers, and cleans, cuts, and separates them into recycled polyester and recycled spandex, supplying textile companies to produce recycled yarn, which is then made into new recycled blend fabric garments by garment manufacturers and flows to the market.

At the policy level, China's "Implementation Opinions on Accelerating the Recycling of Waste Textiles" proposes that by 2025, the textile recycling rate should reach 25%, and the annual output of recycled fibers should reach 2 million tons; by 2030, the recycling rate should reach 30%. In June 2023, the European Parliament passed a resolution on the EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, with the vision that by 2030, all textiles entering the EU market should be durable and recyclable, made from recycled raw materials, and explicitly encourages primary recycling of textiles. Data from the United Nations Environment Programme shows that the textile and apparel industry accounts for 10% of global carbon emissions, more than all flights and shipping combined; it is estimated that by 2030, when the global population grows to 8.5 billion, the carbon emissions of the apparel and textile industry may exceed those of the oil industry, becoming the largest source of carbon emissions.

Mao Debin revealed that after the demonstration plant goes into production, a 10,000-ton-scale polyester blend fabric recycling plant will immediately enter the preparation stage, and a series of collaborations with world-renowned clothing brands will also enter a new phase. This project marks that "fiber-to-fiber" primary recycling technology for blended fabrics has entered the industrialization stage, and is expected to provide a new technological path for high-value utilization of waste textiles and the green and low-carbon transformation of the textile industry.

Source: Fiber recovery rate exceeds 99%, your unwanted old clothes have new uses · Originally published on 2024-09-20