Closing the Loop on Technical Textiles
SHAPE towards 2030: What do we need to solve next?. With the extension of SHAPE towards 2030, we are entering a new phase of our journey. Building on what we have learned and achieved so far, the focus now shifts towards the next challenges, opportunities and questions we need to solve together.
In this blog series, SHAPE’s Work Pack Leaders share their perspectives on what comes next, what they see as the most important challenges to address, where new collaboration is needed and what they hope to achieve in the years ahead.
In Work Package 8, we are working towards an ambitious target: recycling our technical textiles.
As a textile engineer, I have followed the global development of textile recycling for many years. For some reason, the discussion is almost always around clothing, while technical and industrial textiles receive much less attention.
When we think about textiles, it’s easy to think about what we are wearing today. But you almost have to be inside the industry to understand just how many applications rely on textiles: car airbags, ship interiors, baby wipes, cleaning accessories, geotextiles, mattresses, paper machines, and yes, abrasives too.
Because these applications are often overlooked in the public discussion, pioneer companies are already trying to solve circularity challenges themselves. At Mirka, we have set a target of reaching 70% circularity in our products by 2035, and part of the work towards that target is being done within SHAPE.
In addition to ecodesign, we are looking at how to recycle the technical textiles in our products, including textiles from post-consumer products. And that is not an easy task.
How do you recycle a multi-material product that has been designed to last?
Our R&D team is working hard to answer that question. But we already know that the answer is not only about chemistry or finding the right recycling technology. We need an entire ecosystem around it: customers willing to pilot recycling with us, waste companies to collect post-consumer products, shipping and forwarding, inspection and sorting, treatment facilities, recycling technologies, and ultimately a closed-loop solution that can bring the recovered materials back into our products at premium quality.
Quality is a key part of the equation. We know that customers will continue to expect high quality and performance from Mirka products in the future, so we are only interested in circular solutions that maintain or improve that quality.
Today, an abrasive is essentially a linear product: make, take, toss away.
With our new grain recycling technology, we are already able to recycle one valuable component. Now our ambition is to take the next steps and recover even more valuable raw materials.
An abrasive can contain up to 25% synthetic textiles, and these materials have the potential to be recycled back into virgin-quality yarn. Textile materials are also a significant contributor to our Scope 3 emissions, making them a natural focus area as we work towards both our circularity and sustainability targets.
But closing this loop is not something we can do alone.
I would love to connect with other professionals working with textiles, polymers, recycling technologies, reverse logistics or other parts of the circular value chain. If you have an idea, technology, capability or potential collaboration that could help us move forward, please get in touch.
Ida Koivisto
Technology Manager & Workpack Leader for WP 8 Recyclability of Technical Textiles