Upcycling pre-consumer cotton waste to create a high-performance composite material for reuse in the fashion and apparel industry. In the textile industry, mechanical fiber recycling processes present several drawbacks, especially for pre-consumer waste, where the fibers (often cut or damaged) are not suitable for fiber-to-fiber recycling. Another critical issue concerns the durability of natural fibers, which can deteriorate when subjected to overly aggressive manufacturing processes or treatments. Furthermore, fiber treatment operations are expensive, often exceeding the value of the recovered material.

Therefore, it is interesting to formulate a material obtained from the upcycling of cotton textile waste that overcomes the limitations of currently available processes and materials, shifting the focus from fiber regeneration to non-standard manufacturing approaches. Cotton, one of the most widely used fibers in the industry, was studied both to preserve some of its properties within the new material and to improve the properties of the starting polymer matrices, leading to the production of a unique, replicable composite material that can be easily processed using some of the leading manufacturing technologies (injection molding, extrusion, FDM additive manufacturing).  

This work is currently pending patent application number: 102025000033790 dated December 17, 2025.