Dear readers,
In the EU, about 10 million tonnes of textile waste end up in the residual waste every year and are often incinerated. The Austrian TEX2MAT project developed a strategy for recycling polyester-cotton blended fabrics.
A new approach to this was enzymatic separation! But what does that mean?
Key elements for this were the new technologies and methods contributed by the research partners for separating and processing this waste from polyester, polyamides as well as blended fabrics. A new methodological approach is to separate the materials enzymatically. The resulting materials will be characterised and sorted into quality classes. By means of fibre preparation technologies and granulation or compounding, the raw materials thus obtained are reprocessed into fibres or injection moulded parts. The new process was tested in practice and its suitability evaluated in case studies. The declared goal was to be able to produce new 1A fibres or new 1A components from the separated material waste.
For the project "TEX2MAT - New Processes for Recycling Textile Waste of Multi-Material Composition", the State Prize 2021 for Environmental and Energy Technology was awarded by Climate Protection Minister Leonore Gewessler in the category "Circular Economy & Resource Efficiency".
We are proud that we have been a "TEX2MAT" project partner and that we have made our contribution to receiving the State Prize for Environment & Energy Technology.
