Worn Again Technologies and partners have succceeded in a joint bid for grant funding from Innosuisse, the Swiss Innovation Agency, for a project exploring the conversion of waste textiles into higher-grade PET for the production of technical parts.

The new four-year project, Towards a NetZero Plastics Industry, which involves Sulzer, IWK (the Swiss Institute of Materials Technology and Plastics Processing) and others, will start in January 2024.

Worn Again will produce PET for application testing with Sulzer Chemtech’s technology for converting the raw material into advanced foams, and resins for injection moulding at IWK’s facility. This will be underpinned by an ongoing assessment of climate benefits which will feed into a digital decarbonisation tool that IWK will develop for dissemination to Swiss manufacturers.

The project aligns with Worn Again’s plans to bring online it’s demonstration chemical recycling plant in Winterthur.

“We want to use our demo plant and develop the surrounding value chain as a blueprint for building out the circular economy globally,” said  Toby Moss, director of business development at Worn Again. “Our clients want our technology to deliver environmental benefit and generate value. In addition to our core fibre-to-fibre offering, by enabling non-textile outcomes for our circular products, our clients can leverage their plants to maximise both outcomes.”

Worn Again has already established the Swiss Textile Recycling Ecosystem and this new project will create additional mechanisms for the circular economy in Switzerland, and as a potential blueprint for expanding the new value chain elsewhere.

Worn Again’s chemical recycling process reclaims virgin-quality products and returns them to the supply chain. The process allows textile manufacturers to separate and decontaminate PET resin and cellulose from end-of-life textiles, producing superior materials for manufacturers across multiple industries.

www.wornagain.co.uk