Waste Textiles Exceed 20 Million Tons Per Year, Recycling "Dig Treasure" To Break Through The Bottleneck Of Reuse.

Uncontaminated textile waste, old clothing, inferior cotton and other refuse are recyclables.

Uncontaminated waste textiles, such as old clothes, ingredients, spinning, packaging, plastic products, are also recyclables.

But from this we can feel that the quantity of waste textiles is much beyond our imagination. According to the recently published white paper on the technological progress of recycling and utilization of waste textiles in China, we can see that 20 million tons of waste textiles can be produced every year in China.

Under the guidance of relevant policies in recent years, China has initially formed an industrial chain for the recycling, sorting, dismantling, processing and utilization of waste textiles. Despite this, the recycling rate of waste textiles in China is still less than 20%.

Looking forward to the Industrial Research Institute, the recycling value of waste textiles has increased considerably in the recycling of renewable resources, accounting for an increase of over 50% in 2017. Therefore, how to achieve the high quality recycling of waste textiles is an important topic in the industry. This is also the original intention of the "green industrial chain innovation forum for the high value utilization of waste textiles in 2019" held in May 2019.

Experts in the conference agreed that waste textiles were a category lacking in the high-value utilization system at the back end. It is urgent to study new technologies and new fields and break through the bottleneck of industrial back-end utilization.

In order to achieve the high quality recycling of waste textiles, some innovative practice cases have appeared in China. Professor Wu of East China University of Science and Technology has developed a fiber reinforced plastic composite material made from waste textile fiber reinforced polyolefin modified materials.

According to Professor Wu, this composite material can be reused many times, and can be widely used in the fields of industry, agriculture, architecture and life. It provides a new way for recycling and reusing waste fibers.

In addition, the innovative textile and composite material innovation team of the textile science and Engineering College of Xi'an Polytechnic University has made use of waste denim, after many processing and processing, made similar material like adhesive. This material can be used as a thermal insulation material or sound insulation material. On this basis, new materials produced by technical treatment will form a "hard plate", which will not be a problem for making furniture or replacing wooden floor.

Fan Wei, a team leader, said that intelligent wearable textiles with real-time monitoring functions such as heart rate, pulse and human movement state will be popular. At present, he and his team have made some smart wearable textiles with piezoelectric fibers.

It is worth noting that innovation "textile" will increasingly integrate into all aspects of life. Some materials and clothing with special functions will be the focus of future research and development, such as washing free, antibacterial and deodorizing, hygroscopic and quick drying.

Statistics show that our country has accumulated more and more experience in the utilization of waste textiles, and whether we can get more innovative clothing raw materials through the utilization of waste textiles, we need further exploration.

According to the rough calculation of the industry, if China's waste textiles can be recycled all the time, it can save 24 million tons of crude oil and nearly 1/3 of the cotton planting area each year, which can reduce 80 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

In particular, there is no shortcut to promote the high quality recycling of waste textiles.