Polyester: luxurious, recyclable, long-lasting and resistant
The first polyester for textile use was introduced on the market in 1948 in England, under the trademark Terylene. Thanks to continuous technological innovation and design creativity, today polyester, even recycled polyester, is used even in expensive, valuable and very high-quality fabrics.
Major mainstream brands such as Nike, G-Star, Patagonia and Adidas are using recycled polyester for their sports and outdoor clothing. We must not forget the Pleats Please collection by Issey Miyake, the first to propose a line of high fashion dresses in 100% Polyester jersey for women in the early 90s, whose cutting, sewing and pleating technique was patented in 1993, an experiment that showed the potential of this unsurpassed synthetic fiber.
Some industry studies place polyester at the top of the fibers used worldwide in the fashion market, a record achieved thanks to the low cost and extreme versatility of this material; nevertheless, the fiber continues to suffer from a “bad reputation” due to its synthetic nature.
Polyester is normally used in combination (hidden) providing stability, resistance and shape retention to natural fiber garments. The partners of the Trash-2-Cash project aim to go beyond the limitations of mixed fiber fabrics and to make polyester coupled with natural fibers “eco-friendly” and ready for a circular economy.
The objective of the T2C project is first and foremost to define a regeneration process capable of recovering single polyester and cellulose fibers from cotton-polyester mixed fabrics, in order to regenerate and reuse them to create new yarns with the same characteristics as the original fibers if not improved for specific applications: innovative garments, technical clothing, reinforced plastics.
