A Nottingham-based textile recycling technology company that separates polyester and cotton from worn-out clothes and packaging so they can become new raw materials.
Worn Again Technologies is working on a problem most of us never see: what happens to clothes that are too worn to be reused. Today, almost none of that material is turned back into new clothing. The company says current recycling methods return less than 1 per cent of non-reusable textiles to new textile production. Its answer is a chemical recycling process that takes clothes made from a mix of polyester and cotton, plus polyester packaging, and separates the two materials. The polyester and the cotton-derived cellulose that come out can then go back into existing supply chains as raw materials in place of brand-new oil-based and farmed resources.
In its own words, the company's aim is to eradicate textile waste and keep resources in constant circulation, with economic, social and environmental benefits. It describes itself as developing circular recycling technologies for textiles, replacing virgin resources with recaptured raw materials. Cyndi Rhoades is named as its founder. It is part of the Unreasonable Group. The company's model is to develop the technology and then license it to plant operators around the world, rather than to run every recycling plant itself.
In the UK, the company is headquartered in Nottingham, and its research and development laboratory is in Nottingham city centre. It launched a pilot research facility at the Centre for Process Innovation in early 2020, which is a UK technology-development organisation, to test its commercial process. Its larger demonstration plant, which handles 1,000 tonnes a year, is in Winterthur in Switzerland, and the company has joined the ACT UK project, which is working on automated sorting and preparation of unwearable clothing for recycling. A directory page listed it as a small team of 6 to 20 people.
A job advert on its own site gives a flavour of the culture. It describes an expert team and strategic partners, and it asks for people with a can-do attitude who help colleagues and the wider business. The laboratory work includes making cellulose samples with specialist equipment, testing them against customer requirements, preparing incoming textile samples, and keeping the lab safe and tidy. Chief executive Erik Koep, interviewed on a climate technology podcast, comes from an engineering background that includes taking teams from research stage to large-scale manufacturing.
The sorts of people a company like this employs include research scientists and laboratory technicians, who run experiments and measure results, process and chemical engineers, who work out how to scale a lab process into a plant, project managers, and people who work with fashion brands and recyclers on partnerships. Chemistry, chemical engineering, materials science and textiles are the obvious starting subjects, and the company also needs people who can build relationships across the clothing industry. The company's own site is the place to check what is open at the moment.
Website: wornagain.co.uk
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