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Worn Again Technologies unveils pilot R&D facility

10
Feb '20

Pic: Worn Again Technologies

Worn Again Technologies, the polymer recycling technology firm, has unveiled its pilot R and D facility at CPI, a technology and innovation centre in Redcar, England. The company extracts raw materials from non-reusable products with an aim to eliminate waste and replace the use of virgin resources. The plant will validate the company’s proprietary process.

The pilot plant is designed to validate and develop Worn Again Technologies’ proprietary process which separates, decontaminates and extracts PET polymer and cellulose (from cotton) from non-reusable textiles and PET bottles and packaging to go back into supply chains as raw materials to become new products as part of a continual cycle.

Worn Again Technologies’ state-of-the-art process and pilot plant has been designed and built with the help of leading equipment providers. The purpose of the plant is to develop further process data, knowledge and understanding to enable the business to set the technical parameters and scale the engineering design, as a step to industrialisation. CPI was chosen as a facility to host the plant in view of the technical excellence it provides to help accelerate technologies to market.

Nick Ryan, Worn Again Technologies’ technology director comments: “The pilot is a significant step in developments as it will allow us to confirm and further optimise the different steps in the process in one unit, accelerating our engineering development to the next step of a demonstrator plant.”

Cyndi Rhoades, founder of Worn Again Technologies says: “It is exciting to have progressed our developments from lab to plant. While there is still a long road ahead, it’s the next tangible step getting us closer to a scalable, commercially viable industrial process that will enable the move away from using finite virgin resources to the circularity of raw materials.”

Kris Wadrop, director of Biotechnology CPI, says: “CPI is delighted to host the Worn Again Technologies pilot plant within our scale-up facilities at Wilton, Redcar. Supporting a company at the forefront of the circular economy promoting sustainable fashion by using the strengths of the chemical industry on Teesside is an ideal combination and part of the reason CPI exists.’’

The team, coordinated by Worn Again Technologies’ chief scientific officer Dr. Adam Walker, began working with CPI on the commissioning of the pilot in Q4 2019. The apparatus will be run with a rigorous, disciplined scientific process to meet the needs of the market and customers’ high expectations. Experimentation will include testing of the process using various inputs to understand the yield and quality impact on the product.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (SV)

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