Post by matterr

Same monomers. Separate systems. A missed opportunity. 🎥 In this clip from PERFORMANCE DAYS Munich, our Head of Textile Recycling Leonard Both shares insights on shifting from product-based thinking to a material-based approach, when defining pathways for recycled material. Every PET product, fibre or packaging, starts from the same building blocks. Yet discussions about recycling systems are still largely defined by product categories: textile-to-textile and packaging-to-packaging. In practice, this rigidity would create limitations. Materials flows are driven by demand and market value, while source-material quality varies and recyclers depend on large volumes for economic viability. There may be demand for recycled PET, but not necessarily enough demand for recycled textile fibres at a given time, price, or specification. Requiring recycled polyester from textiles to go back only into textile applications, can therefore create bottlenecks. Once materials have been qualified for recycling, further fragmentation by application introduces inefficiencies and limits scalability. By breaking polyester down into its building blocks, chemical recycling enables the transformation of materials, independent of their original application. This means polyester from textiles can flow into a T-shirt, a rope, or a packaging application, wherever demand and value are highest. This creates a more scalable, efficient and sustainable infrastructure for recycling PET textiles and other materials. 👉 Listen to the full presentation on our website: https://lnkd.in/dY233aMz

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