Recycled cotton fiber can replace wood in viscose production
From waste to fiber, new research on recycled cotton points the way toward more sustainable textile production. Currently, the textile industry is one of the most polluting industries. In addition to large impacts from petroleum-based synthetic fiber production, natural textiles with a "greener reputation," such as cotton, also have a large impact due to their high accompanying demands for water, land and chemicals for crop cultivation and additional demand for water and chemicals for further processing into the finished cotton textiles.
"Climate change concerns everyone, yet it is often portrayed as a problem of the future," says Elise Meurs, a doctoral student in chemical engineering at the Exact Industrial Research School.
The current textile industry produces 132 million tons of textile fiber material globally, but less than 1% of this production is currently made from recycled textiles. Consequently, not only the production but also the end-of-life stage of textile products are polluting, since large amounts of waste are currently being burned or landfilled, instead of reused or recycled. Therefore, besides the climate impact of the textile industry often being described as a consumer-mentality issue, the industry currently does not offer large-scale and accessible sustainable options.
"Considering the cotton industry, currently contributing nearly 25 million tons of textile fiber materials, 99% of its total production is produced from virgin cotton demanding immense amounts of resources for its cultivation and processing," says Meurs. Currently, the scale of cotton recycling is rather small, which leaves room for developing efficient and large-scale opportunities for cotton recycling.
One of these opportunities could arise from reusing cotton waste as an alternative input for viscose production, which is conventionally made from certain wood types, pulped into sheets of highly pure cellulosic fibers. Therefore, highly pure cellulosic fibers from cotton waste could be alternatively used instead of virgin wood-based feedstock.
However, in order to implement cotton waste for viscose production, its performance during the industrial viscose process should be compared with conventional pulps. Despite both pulps being largely consistent of the same compound—cellulose—other differences in material properties can cause them to behave differently during the long chemical process to obtain new fibers.
Therefore, Meurs's research, now published in Cellulose, starts by comparing the performance of pulped cotton waste from Circulose to conventional virgin wood-based resources during the first steps in the process toward viscose fibers. Also several material properties were investigated, in order to find some answers as to why the materials behave differently.
More information:
E. Meurs et al, Comparing swelling and liquid retention of pulps from textile waste and conventional dissolving pulps, Cellulose (2026). DOI: 10.1007/s10570-026-06943-2
Provided by Karlstad University
