texfash: For years, the industry has recognised blended fabrics—especially polycotton—as one of the toughest obstacles to textile recycling. With the accelerator plant now operational, what does this moment represent for Worn Again’s journey from technology development to real-world demonstration?
Toby Moss: Our Textile-to-Fibre Accelerator plant creates a platform which scales the polycotton recycle process beyond laboratory scale. Once fully operational, we will have the capability to produce & validate both product streams, Circular Polyester and Cellulosic Fibres, delivering meaningful volumes to our partners with the goal of executing commercial & binding offtake agreements.
You’ve described the facility as an “accelerator” rather than simply a recycling plant. What kinds of learning, experimentation, or collaboration do you hope this space will enable as the technology moves closer to industrial reality?
Toby Moss: Worn Again is a technology company. We believe that significant uptake of recycling at a global scale will require the participation of multiple partners who can utilise our technology to augment their operations, enabling a transition to a textiles circular economy. Our Accelerator plant provides those partners a demonstration of the technology in operation, which can be leveraged for trials and product tests, enabling much larger scale investments in recycling capacity.
Recycling technologies often perform well under controlled conditions but encounter surprises when dealing with the messy mix of post-consumer textiles. How are you preparing the plant to handle the variability that comes with real waste streams?
Toby Moss: The Worn Again process has been designed from the start to process polycottons, which are a cornerstone fabric in modern clothes, but also some of the hardest to recycle. We also provide a unique solution to the market, which is the solvent based recycling approach. This approach is able to selectively target key materials, in this case polyester and cotton, in a way that other technologies are not. With these design features, we see significant competitive advantage in the flexibility to process the variable feedstock qualities which are inherent in post-consumer markets. Ultimately, though, the jury is still out and we will see as the technology scales where it can be most economically attractive.
A recurring question around advanced recycling technologies is whether they can ever make economic sense at scale. What are the key indicators you’ll be watching over the next few years to determine whether this model can truly work at an industrial level?
Toby Moss: No technology exists in a vacuum and, as you know, the textile market is highly dynamic and innovative. It's our job as technology innovators to continue to develop in such a way that drives down the cost of processing and unlocking broader application of the technology to more cost effective feedstocks. We do that by building strategic partnerships with the post-consumer industry, scaling up our volumes with our production operators and investing in engineering to unlock process & supply chain efficiencies. Already, we are investing in the next generation of solvents which can offer better recycling rates, higher product qualities and more efficient processing. In parallel, we have projects to valorise more of the common feedstocks which are present in the post-consumer market, for example by containing tricky "contaminants", like elastane, and opening our products to high-value, non-apparel textile markets.
