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Textile Waste Recycling: Emerging Technologies, Environmental Challenges, and Sustainable Solutions
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This review synthesizes current knowledge on textile waste recycling, covering mechanical, chemical, and biological recycling technologies alongside environmental challenges and sustainability trade-offs. The authors highlight microfiber shedding and hazardous dye contamination as key barriers to effective textile circularity, and identify emerging solutions including enzymatic processing and closed-loop fiber-to-fiber recycling.
The textile and apparel industry has been identified as one of the most resource-intensive sectors globally, with substantial environmental burdens arising from fiber production, dyeing, finishing, and disposal. Textile recycling represents a critical pathway toward sustainable resource management and circular economy implementation. The rapid expansion of global textile production and consumption has intensified the accumulation of textile waste, creating urgent environmental, economic, and social concerns. This review synthesizes current knowledge on textile waste streams, with emphasis on the classification of natural, synthetic, and blended materials and the unique challenges they present for recycling. Emerging technologies including advanced mechanical recycling, chemical depolymerization, enzymatic treatments, and fiber-to-fiber regeneration are critically assessed for their efficiency, scalability, material recovery rates, and environmental footprints. The review further examines key environmental challenges such as microplastic pollution, hazardous chemical release, landfill overuse, and high energy demands associated with traditional waste management pathways. In response to these issues, sustainable solutions such as circular economy frameworks, eco-design principles, closed-loop manufacturing, and policy interventions are discussed. The paper highlights successful global initiatives and industry innovations that demonstrate the feasibility of achieving a circular textile system. Finally, research gaps and future directions are identified to support the transition toward resource-efficient, low-impact textile waste management. This review provides a comprehensive foundation for stakeholders seeking to enhance sustainability across the textile value chain.
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Fibre-to-Fibre Recycling in Textiles: Strategies, Limitations and Industrial Perspectives
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This review analyzes fibre-to-fibre textile recycling strategies for cotton, polyester, viscose, polyamide, and wool, identifying feedstock heterogeneity, fibre blending, and quality degradation as the main barriers to scaling circular textile systems. Improving textile recycling is directly relevant to microplastic pollution, as synthetic textile fibres—particularly polyester—are among the largest sources of microplastic fibre release into wastewater and the environment.
Environmental Impact of Textile Materials: Challenges in Fiber–Dye Chemistry and Implication of Microbial Biodegradation
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This review examines how the textile industry contributes to environmental pollution through both chemical dye waste and microplastic fiber release. Synthetic fabrics like polyester and nylon shed non-biodegradable microfibers during manufacturing and washing, while the dyeing process generates contaminated wastewater. The paper highlights microbial biodegradation as a promising and cost-effective approach to breaking down both textile waste and the microplastics it produces.
Synthetic dyes: a barrier to circular economy within the textile industry?
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This review found that synthetic dyes embedded in textiles are a major barrier to fiber-to-fiber recycling because dye removal is chemically complex, generates hazardous byproducts, and can itself release microplastic fibers and toxic solvents. Life-cycle analyses of recycled textiles show inconsistent environmental benefits, partly because the recycling process creates new pollution. The authors argue that designing clothes without synthetic dyes from the outset would dramatically improve the environmental performance of the fashion industry's growing circular economy ambitions.
Textile Recycling’s Hidden Problem: Surface-Modified Fiber Fragments Emitted at Every Stage
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Researchers investigated microplastic fiber release during chemical recycling of polyester-cotton blended textiles and found that the dye removal stage generated the highest fiber counts, averaging around 10,055 fibers per gram of textile waste. Alkaline hydrolysis reduced fiber emissions during the treatment stage by nearly 88% compared to acid hydrolysis. The study highlights that textile recycling processes, while essential for sustainability, can themselves be a significant source of microplastic fiber pollution.
Strategies of Recovery and Organic Recycling Used in Textile Waste Management
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This review discusses recovery and organic recycling strategies for post-consumer textile waste, covering acid hydrolysis, ionic liquids, enzymatic hydrolysis, and fiber reclamation approaches. The authors note that multi-material synthetic textiles remain a significant challenge for circular economy recycling due to the difficulty of separating blended fiber types.
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