Cotton is not the answer to meet the rapidly growing demand for textile fibers. Wood-based regenerated cellulose fibers are an attractive alternative. Since wood is a candidate to replace fossil raw materials in so many applications of the circular economy, other sources need investigation. Cotton linters work in the viscose process -can cotton waste be used to make dissolving pulp? We describe the textile qualities of lyocell fibers from (i) pure cotton waste pulp and (ii) blending with conventional dissolving pulp. The staple fibers were tensile tested, yarns spun and tensile tested and knitted, and tested for shrinkage, water and dye sorption, abrasion resistance, fuzzing and pilling, staining and fastness. TENCEL Õ staple fibers and off-the-shelf TENCEL Õ yarn were used as references. The results show that the two study fibers had tenacity and an E-modulus that exceeded the staple fiber reference. Also, the study yarns were at least as good as the spun reference yarn and the commercial off-the-shelf yarn in terms of wet tenacity. Single jerseys made from the study yarns shrunk less upon laundering, which is surprising since they could absorb at least as much water at a comparable rate as the references. Dyeability, staining and color fastness, durability and pilling tendency showed that the two study fiber tricots performed at least as good as the references. This study suggests that cotton waste is a promising candidate for special grade pulp to suit niche regenerated fiber products or to spice up conventional woodbased dissolving pulp.

The demand for textile fibres is growing quickly. However, global cotton production has stabilized around 25 Mton/year. This is a sound development since cotton cultivation causes major sustainable development issues. Even if regenerated cellulose fibre production steadily grows, it is still only from a sixth to a fifth of cotton volumes. Hence, it is essential to find resource-efficient routes to generate alternatives to virgin cotton. There are many promising research initiatives that discover the possibility to utilize waste streams of neat cotton and cotton in fibre blends as raw materials for dissolving pulp for regeneration into, for example, viscose or Lyocell. However, there is a much simpler and energy-efficient route at hand. If fabrics are disintegrated mechanically, the separated fibres can be turned into yarn again. However, since fibre length is a key parameter to accomplish strong and durable textiles, fibre length loss upon tearing should be minimized. This study evaluates how fibre length distribution alters upon tearing of post-consumer cotton waste of two different constructions: denim and single jersey; and different degrees of wear, rendering four different fractions: (1) barely worn denim, (2) rather worn denim, (3) barely worn single-jersey and (4) rather worn single-jersey. Before tearing, the garments were dissembled, their yarns were characterized, fibre length distributions were manually determined for (1)–(4). Length analysis of the recovered fibres after tearing revealed that the length drop was most severe for (a) the finer single-jersey and (b) the barely worn fractions. The findings suggest that significant wear does not exclude from mechanical recycling.