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 working on a technology for the chemical recycling of cellulose and polyester and is now working towards building a full-scale facility.
If successful, Dissolva’s facility will be able to process 25,000–30,000 tonnes of textile waste per year.
At its upcoming pilot plant, Dissolva will be able to process 300 kilos per day. The process involves chemically treating the textiles, with the treatment being adapted to the specific input material.
The chemical process removes colour, PFAS and other additives from the fibres in the textile waste. The final products will be purified raw materials in the form of uncoloured cellulose, which can replace cotton fibres, or an uncoloured polymer, which can replace polyester and therefore be used in new textile products.
A by-product of the chemical process is wastewater, which must subsequently be treated, as it contains the PFAS, colour and other chemicals that were present in the textile waste.
Dissolva’s technology has been developed to process blended textiles from households, which are particularly challenging to recycle. This is because the material is unknown and heterogeneous and of relatively low quality, as it contains used and worn fibres.
The company is seeing significant interest in the treatment of post-consumer textile waste and estimates that its technology could process 90% of all textile waste.
In parallel, Dissolva is participating in a project to develop cellulose fibres from grass. The project aims to make use of a residual product from grass-based pig feed and convert it into a fibre resembling cotton.
The quality is considered to be sufficiently high to improve the quality of cotton produced through chemical recycling, potentially bringing it on a par with virgin cotton when the two fibres are blended.
Developments in chemical recycling are relevant for Tekstilretur to follow, as they offer significant potential for handling textile waste that cannot be processed by other technologies due to its low quality or complex composition. This also includes very small textile waste particles, down to dust level.
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.