Turning the Tide on Textile Waste: How Fabric Blend Recycling is Supporting Circularity
By Morgane Nyfeler, Journalist
Each year, the fashion industry generates an estimated over 100 million tonnes of textile waste. While this figure is alarming, it also highlights a significant opportunity: with advancements in recycling technologies, single-fibre materials like 100% cotton or polyester are increasingly recyclable and can be reintegrated into the production loop. However, the majority of textiles today are blended fabrics such as cotton-polyester or polyamide-elastane which pose a major challenge. These blends are difficult to separate, and current recycling technologies are not yet available at scale to meet the performance requirements of new products.
As global textile waste is projected to reach 134 million tonnes annually by 2030, tackling how we recycle blended fabrics is a pressing issue. In response, innovative technologies are emerging with the potential to unlock fibre-to-fibre recycling at scale, offering more sustainable pathways for fashion’s future.
At Global Fashion Agenda, these innovations are showcased through the Innovation Forum and celebrated by the Trailblazer Programme at the Global Fashion Summit. One standout innovator in this space is Refiberd, winner of the 2025 Trailblazer Programme, whose upstream solution is paving the way for more efficient recycling processes. As part of the Innovation Forum, traceability platforms Trace for Good, Retraced and Ympact offer digital infrastructure to track materials across the supply chain, while recycling technologies RE&UP process blended textiles into high-quality recycled fibres. Meanwhile, matterr breaks down textile waste into virgin-like raw materials, drop-in ready for the endlessly repeatable production of new polyester.
Fabric blends are widely used in the industry for their desirable properties: breathability, stretch, durability and comfort. But their mixed composition can make conventional recycling methods ineffective. Current infrastructure mainly supports mechanical recycling of mono-materials, and blended fabrics often contaminate these streams, which further reduces recyclability.
Moreover, improper sorting and lack of transparency across supply chains intensifies the issue. Even when textile-to-textile recycling is possible, the absence of fibre identification technologies and scalable sorting solutions limits real-world recovery.
The ability to recycle any material begins with knowing what it’s made of. Traceability platforms such as Trace for Good, Retraced and Ympact offer vital infrastructure to track a garment’s origin and composition across the supply chain.
Traceability platforms often rely on upstream supplier data, which doesn’t always account for the entire supply chain, especially in post-consumer waste streams. Refiberd aims to offer a new frontier. Using advanced AI-driven hyperspectral imaging, the U.S.-based startup can detect fibre composition in used textiles with reportedly over 90% accuracy, even in complex, dyed or worn garments. This data is used to sort garments by fibre type at scale, generating cleaner input streams that are ready for recycling.
What makes the innovation different lies in both speed and precision. By automating fibre identification and sorting, Refiberd strives to overcome one of the most time- and labour-intensive barriers to circularity. This smarter sorting helps recyclers to process blends more effectively, ensuring feedstock quality for mechanical and chemical processes downstream.
“We are looking to expand across the textile industry wherever material information is needed, from material flow in manufacturing to counterfeits in resale, and sorting textile waste for recycling,” said Sarika Bajaj, Refiberd’s CEO and Co-Founder. The company recently secured $3.4 million in seed funding to further expand its operations.
Once fibres are identified and sorted, the next challenge is turning them back into usable raw material. That’s where RE&UP and matterr come in – RE&UP develops technologies that process blended textiles into high-quality recycled fibres, while matterr breaks down polyester textiles into virgin-quality raw materials for new production.
Operating in Turkey and the Netherlands, RE&UP uses a proprietary thermo-mechanical separation process to recover cotton and polyester from blended fibres at industrial scale. Crucially, their process uses minimal water or hazardous chemicals, which, according to RE&UP, can cut CO₂ emissions by up to 28%, water by up to 90% and land use by up to 75% compared to virgin alternatives. Its work with brands like PUMA, through the RE:FIBRE initiative, reflects how such innovations can be scaled commercially, with plans to reach one million tonnes of recycled output annually.
Meanwhile, matterr is advancing its chemical recycling technology for difficult-to-recycle textile blends, particularly those containing elastane and other synthetics. These materials are common in sportswear and stretch garments, which are often excluded from current recycling streams. matterr’s R&D centre and pilot plant are located in Braunschweig, where the company is developing a hydrolysis-based process to break down complex polyester textiles into virgin-quality raw materials. To demonstrate scalability, matterr is setting up its first small-scale industrial plant in a chemical park in North Rhine-Westphalia, supported by up to €30 million in state funding, aiming to enable broader inclusion of real-world textile waste into circular systems.
Together, RE&UP and matterr represent a new generation of recycling technologies that are not only more sustainable but also more inclusive, capable of processing the full complexity of today’s fashion materials.
What connects these innovators is a shared vision: transforming textile waste into a regenerative resource. Refiberd works to improve the quality of inputs through smart sorting. RE&UP recovers and regenerates fibres into higher-quality outputs, while matterr breaks down PET to its molecular building blocks, creating virgin-like materials that enable circularity. Traceability platforms ensure transparency and accountability throughout the process.
As brands face increasing regulatory pressure – from Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes to the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation – innovations such as these are becoming undeniably necessary. They provide tangible, evidence-based solutions for embedding circularity into the design, production and end-of-life management of garments.
Fabric blends have long represented a blind spot in fashion’s recycling efforts. But today, through innovation and collaboration, they could become part of the solution. The industry is one step closer to realising a truly circular fashion system – one where even the most complex materials can find a second life.
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