Recycled fibers still make up a sliver of global fiber production, even as textile-to-textile recycling draws growing attention from mills, brands and regulators. In the fifth episode of ReCIRCLE by TexSPACE, four panelists working across recycled cellulosics and stretch fibers discussed what it actually takes to make sustainable fiber commercially viable, and why purpose alone is no longer enough to sell a fiber.
The panel featured Pramod Agrawal, CEO and Co-founder of SaXcell; Engr. Mohammad Mesbah Uddin, Country Manager (Bangladesh Office) at China Textile Academy Green Fibre Co., Ltd.; Alistair Williamson, VP of Product Sustainability at The LYCRA Company; and Alberto Ceria, Technical Product Manager at The LYCRA Company. Najmus Sakib, Sub-editor at TexSPACE Today, moderated the discussion.
Textile waste, not cotton fields, is the world’s largest untapped fiber source
Pramod Agrawal began by focusing where the industry should be looking for raw material. Around 92 million tonnes of textile waste is discarded every year, and less than one percent of it is recycled back into textiles, he said. Against that backdrop, lyocell stands out as a strong alternative to cotton and viscose, he argued, since viscose production is still chemically intensive and cotton requires far more irrigated water.
SaXcell’s contribution, he explained, is to make lyocell-grade pulp from post-consumer cotton waste rather than wood. The company has proven the process at lab and pilot scale, and is now building a near-industrial pulp plant in the Netherlands, expected to start by the end of the year with an initial capacity of 250 tonnes, scalable toward 3,000 tonnes. He picked the Netherlands for its established feed stock infrustracture and its extended producer responsibility framework, which supports processors using post-consumer textile waste.
“Technology is no longer the barrier,” he said, pointing to a growing number of European and American companies now scaling mechanical, thermomechanical and chemical recycling from pilot to near-industrial levels.
Lyocell offers a cleaner process, but supporting infrastructure still needs to catch up
Engr. Mesbah introduced his company, a subsidiary of the state-owned China Textile Academy Green Fibre Corporation, which produces lyocell fiber in Bangladesh under the brand Green Fiber.
He described lyocell as a closed-loop process built around N-methylmorpholine oxide solvent, with roughly 99.87 percent of that solvent recovered and reused, resulting in lower water and energy use compared with earlier generations of man-made cellulosics such as viscose and modal. Global consumption of cellulosic fiber now sits between 40 and 50 billion units, he noted, and demand keeps climbing.
“It will be improved day by day,” he said of the gap between Bangladesh’s lyocell-supporting infrastructure and the pace of the technology, adding that he expects it to strengthen over time.
Consumers no longer separate comfort, sustainability and durability
Turning to stretch fibers, Alberto Ceria said consumers now expect comfort, sustainability and durability together, in a single garment, rather than as competing trade-offs. The LYCRA Company’s product vision spans three stages, he said: how the fiber is made, how it performs in a garment, and how it can be treated at end of life.
On the raw material side, the company launched a commercially available fiber this year containing up to 70 percent renewable content sourced from corn, without altering the technical performance of the stretch fiber. Durability matters too, he said, since a longer garment life reduces how much ends up as waste; the company’s Lycra Extra Life platform, for instance, targets chlorine resistance for swimwear and ladder resistance for hosiery.
On recycling, He said spandex is rarely a recycler’s primary target since it typically makes up only a small share of a fabric’s fiber content. LYCRA is instead partnering with recyclers processing polyester or cellulosics so that the stretch component is recovered rather than destroyed.
“The technology is there, or almost there,” he said, “but what is still missing is the infrastructure.”
Sustainability should not mean giving up performance
Alistair Williamson pointed to how far recycled and bio-based materials have come technically over the past 15 to 20 years, comparing it to the early days of recycled paper, which was once rough and poor quality but now matches virgin paper. Consumer expectations, however, have stayed constant throughout that shift, he said: shoppers expect sustainable products to perform exactly as well as conventional ones, or they will not buy them a second time.
He referenced the company’s renewable Lycra fiber, which replaces roughly 70 percent of the material’s fossil-based glycol input with a corn-based alternative, cutting carbon emissions by up to 45 percent while keeping the same stretch and recovery properties as standard Lycra. For mills in Bangladesh, he said, it functions as a drop-in replacement requiring no change to existing processes.
Pramod Agrawal said. “Sustainability can help open the door, but eventually performance decides whether the fiber stays in the market,”
He cited figures from SaXcell’s Netherlands plant: 10 to 12 litres of water per kilogram of pulp, compared with over 200 litres for viscose and over 2,000 litres for cotton, alongside zero microplastic discharge and no carbon disulfide use. On performance, he said SaXcell fiber offers around 50 percent more absorbency than standard lyocell and needs roughly 40 percent less dye to achieve the same shade.
Traceability is shifting from a compliance box to a competitive edge
Engr. Mesbah said his company has partnered with Sweden-based Circulose to work with pre- and post-consumer waste, and is preparing to formalize traceability documentation alongside its existing FSC and Canopy certifications over the next year or two.
Allistair Williamson agreed traceability has become essential rather than optional, describing an increasingly competitive market in which mills need a verifiable claim to differentiate a fabric or garment. He pointed to the European Union’s incoming Empowering Consumers Directive, intended to curb greenwashing by requiring clearer information on how products are made. LYCRA’s renewable fiber, he said, comes with carbon-dating certification tracing the raw material back to the corn fields it originated from.
“Being able to trace it builds credibility,” he said.
The next five years will demand fibers that do it all
Closing the discussion, Alberto Ceria said sustainability is fast becoming a baseline rather than a choice, but cost remains the constraint: matching the price of decades-old fossil-based production is still difficult for newer recycling technologies operating below scale.
Agrawal added a regulatory dimension, describing how the European Union’s growing sustainability requirements, including looming mandates around life-cycle assessment and digital product passports, are partly aimed at curbing low-quality imports and encouraging local production. He urged Bangladesh, which sources nearly all of its cotton from imports, to take a leadership role in circular fiber processing, citing an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 tonnes of cotton-rich cutting waste already available domestically as a starting point.
Williamson summed up three forces he expects to drive adoption going forward: regulatory compliance, consumer demand and straightforward economics, from water savings to energy efficiency.
“It’s going to be a combination of the three that will drive the future,” he said.
ReCIRCLE by TexSPACE is an initiative to promote dialogue, collaboration, and innovation toward a circular textile ecosystem. Each episode features thought leaders, technology pioneers, brand representatives, and industry practitioners sharing their insights and best practices in textile circularity driving the industry toward a more intelligent, efficient, and sustainable future.
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