EP2: Gerwin Homölle, How to turn old clothes into new textile products via mechanical recycling

During this interactive session, Gerwin Homölle, from ALTEX Textil-Recycling, and Julie Lietaer, from AriadneInnovation, discuss how to turn old clothes into new textile products via mechanical recycling.

Some key takeaways from the session.

• Mechanical recycling, from textile to fiber, sources for raw materials
  • Pre-consumer: waste streams from knitting, spinning, nonwovens, and clothing production
  • Post-consumer: materials from sorting companies, traders, and disposers
    • Collecting organisations sell textiles they can not use to sorting companies, they resort and sell the streams they can not resell to the second hand market.
    • Disposers example: jute coffee bags used for transportation of the coffee beans

• Challenges to buying the raw materials (waste streams)
  • Quantity and quality are not always controllable
    • Companies are investing to eliminate waste as much as possible
    • For suppliers, it is not a ‘product’, but it is considered as waste
    • At the moment lack of raw materials as customers do not buy a lot of new clothes and hence do not clean out their closets
  • Price sensitive market

• The process to go from old jeans to new textile product
  • Recycling company buys stream of old jeans
  • Full jeans go through a cutting line to pre-adjust the length of the fiber: cut min 2 times in 2 different directions
  • The textile pieces continue a rejection process to eliminate all the nontextile materials (like buttons/zippers/labels/..)
    • Repeated 3 times
  • Materials go into a big blending box
  • After blending the fabric pieces proceed to the pulling shredding line :
    • Line with big tumblers with sharp needles
    • For jeans, they use 6 tumblers, as jeans are very strong materials (the more tumblers the finer the fiber)
  • After pulling, the fibers can be pressed into bales for transport
  • Or the fibres can be blended homogeneously with new virgin fibers

• Used denim for a consumer is WASTE, but for a recycler, it is a RAW Material
  • There is around an 8% loss during the whole process to get a new recycled fiber (zippers, buttons, dust,…)
  • For other streams this is around +/- 3% loss

• In 2019 ALTEX Textil-Recycling processed 200T of used jeans
  • Most flows into the automotive market
    • On the bottom of almost every car, there is a nonwoven produced out of 50% old jeans
    • People are not aware of this, and don’t realize the importance of recycling old clothes
  • European Spinning Group managed to spin a new yarn out of these fibers, an opportunity for new, high-quality applications
    • Discover all the projects on www.hackyourjeans.com
  • In cooperation with Ariadne & the Ellie.Connect ecosystem, there are also opportunities to set up your own recycling and product development project

• Why recycling?
  • The raw materials are there, but consumers need to be aware of the importance to recycle them
  • Can eliminate the use of new materials
    • Per 1kg of virgin cotton replaced by recycled materials, you save more than 4.000l water
    • Low energy process for the recycling process