ITENE, the technology center, has completed the FIBREC project, achieving substantial advances in the development of innovative solutions for valorizing complex textile waste. The initiative, funded by the Valencian Institute for Competitiveness and Innovation (IVACE+i) of the Valencian Government and by the European Union through FEDER funds, has enabled the validation of integrated processes aimed at transforming textile waste that is not currently valorized into high-value raw materials for sectors such as packaging and the chemical industry.
The project tackled one of the key challenges facing the circular economy today: the management and valorization of complex post-consumer textile waste, especially polyester–cotton blends (poly-cotton), which currently ends up largely in landfills or incineration due to the technical difficulties associated with recycling.
Lines of Work
To address this challenge, ITENE has worked along three strategic lines: the development of advanced pre-treatment and sorting processes, valorization through mechanical recycling to obtain recycled PET granules, and the development of new chemical recycling routes for fractions unsuitable for conventional processes.
In the realm of pre-treatment, efficiencies in removing ferrous materials reached 94.4%, non-ferrous metals 72%, and non-metallic impurities up to 84%, such as buttons, zippers, and other polymers not including PET. Moreover, the technologies developed have enabled more homogeneous textile streams with higher polyester content, optimizing their subsequent recycling.
“The FIBREC project has demonstrated that it is possible to develop industrializable processes capable of recovering materials from complex textile waste that currently lack viable recycling solutions,” notes Jaime Sanchís, leader of the project at ITENE. “The advances achieved lay the groundwork for generating new secondary raw materials tailored to the real needs of strategic sectors such as packaging or the chemical industry,” he adds.
In the realm of mechanical recycling, ITENE has validated various strategies for obtaining recycled PET granules from textile waste, identifying formulations with mechanical properties similar to those of recycled materials already on the market. Additionally, the optimized formulations will allow incorporating between 20% and 30% textile-derived rPET in injection-molding applications, maintaining performance comparable to commercial packaging.
On the other hand, advances in chemical recycling have been particularly relevant in treating polycotton blends. ITENE has developed and validated several deep eutectic solvents (DES) and solvolysis processes capable of recovering more than 90% of both PET and cotton, promoting the simultaneous valorization of both fractions and consolidating the potential of these technologies for the advanced recycling of complex textile waste.
