Can Chemical Recycling Solve One of the Biggest Challenges in Textile Waste?
Dissolva is a Danish company that previously operated under the name Textile Change.
For several years, the company has been developing a technology for the chemical recycling of cellulose and polyester, and is now working to build a full-scale facility.
If successful, Dissolva’s facility could handle 25,000–30,000 tonnes of textile waste per year.
At its pilot facility, Dissolva is able to process 300 kilograms per day. The process involves chemically treating the textiles after they have been sorted into fractions that are as uniform as possible. This minimises the use of chemicals when the fibre and colour composition is relatively consistent within each batch.
The chemical process removes colour, PFAS and other additives from the fibres in the textile waste. The final product will be an uncoloured cellulose that can replace cotton fibres, or an uncoloured polymer that can replace polyester.
Dissolva primarily works with post-industrial textile waste, i.e. fibres that have never been in a use phase.
This is because the waste is more homogeneous and less complicated to work with. However, the company is seeing significant interest in processing post-consumer textile waste and estimates that its technology could process 90% of textile waste.
Alongside this work, Dissolva is participating in a project to develop cellulose fibres from grass. The aim is to make use of a residual product from grass-based pig feed and convert it into a fibre similar to cotton.
The quality is considered to be good enough to improve the quality of cotton produced through chemical recycling, bringing it up to the level of virgin cotton when the two fibres are blended.
Developments in chemical recycling are relevant for Tekstilretur to follow because the technology offers the potential to handle textile waste that no other technologies can handle. This also includes very small textile waste particles, down to dust-like levels.
However, there is good reason to limit the use of chemical recycling, as the process generates wastewater that must be disposed of as hazardous waste because it contains PFAS, dyes and other unknown chemicals from the textile waste.
Dissolva does not expect to have a full-scale facility ready by the time extended producer responsibility for textiles comes into force in 2028.
The visit to Dissolva was part of the Nordic PRO collaboration, in which we work across Denmark, Norway and Sweden to prepare the best possible framework for the treatment of textile waste under extended producer responsibility.