The textile market is one of the most polluting industries in the world with its waste going to landfill and having a destructive environmental impact.
As the focus on the textile industry’s carbon footprint is becoming evermore salient, businesses like Carbios have been creating innovative solutions.
Carbios has worked on a ground-breaking new solution as they successfully created clear bottles from 100% recycled Purified Terephthalic Acid (rPTA) from textile waste that contains a high PET content
The company’s new technology creates the capacity to access up to 42 million tons of textile waste per year. The innovative solution will mean that more textile waste will be usable to convert into the clear bottles. The textile waste could be worth over $40 billion.
Professor Alain Marty, Chief Scientific Officer of Carbios, said: “I am very proud that we successfully transformed polyester textile waste into clear bottles, which have identical properties as those made from virgin PET. This major innovation allows us to expand our sources of supply which, until now, consisted primarily of PET plastic waste.”
Prior to Carbios’ recycling breakthrough, the mechanical recycling technologies were not efficient enough to be impactful on the textile industry’s carbon footprint as the waste tended to be recycled into padding or materials for insulation.
The upcycling into high-quality PET from polyester textile fibres allow Carbios to utilise the waste for more effectively with more useful applications such as the clear bottle.
“This result demonstrates the extent of our technology’s possibilities: We can now produce transparent bottles from polyester textile waste or from post-consumer coloured bottles. This works both ways – so we can also make a t-shirt from bottles or disposable food trays,” said Professor Marty.
Carbios worked on this project as part of CE-PET (Circular Economy PET) research project alongside its partner TWB (Toulouse White Biotechnology) and was funded by ADEME (the French Environment and Energy Management Agency).
This technological success means that Carbios can tackle two of the most pressing issues our planet face which is textile waste and plastic pollution.
Source: Circular Online
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