Deakin and Salvos Stores link fibre recovery to onshore remanufacturing

Australians send an average of 23kg of clothing per person to landfill each year, according to Australian government figures cited by Deakin University and Salvos Stores — and the two partners have now launched a project to pull some of that material back into new garment production rather than lower-value end uses.

The collaboration pairs Salvos Stores' collection and recovery operations with Deakin's research equipment and pilot-scale manufacturing capability. Funding comes through the Australian government's Trailblazer Universities Programme, and the work will support the charity's Textile Recovery Facility in Queensland. That site sorts clothing by fibre type and colour and automatically removes components such as buttons and zips, producing clean material streams for recycling — no manual decommissioning (stripping garments by hand) required.

What changes for textile recycling?

The commercial hinge is fibre quality. Most textile recycling shreds mixed garments into a blended stream fit only for downcycling into products like insulation or seat wadding. Deakin's researchers want to keep recycled fibres long and clean enough to spin back into clothing.

Chris Hurren, associate professor at Deakin's Institute for Frontier Materials, said the Queensland facility's sorting technology is what makes that plausible.

"The biggest problem with recycling textiles is that you end up with a random mess of fibre types. With the Salvos technology, we're able to get an individual fibre type, which means that we can then process that more efficiently and make better products from it," Hurren said.

On the charity side, the driver is donation quality drift. Meriel Chamberlin, business development manager at Salvos Stores and a textile scientist, said resale-quality donations remain the priority, but a growing share of collected garments can no longer return to shop floors.

"Those garments we collect still contain valuable textile materials, so the challenge is finding ways to recover them and turn them into new products. Our technology allows whole garments to be processed into fabric pieces ready for recycling, without the need for manual decommissioning," Chamberlin said, adding that better sorting keeps more garments in circulation.

Why onshoring enters the picture

The project also doubles as an onshoring test bed. Deakin's Future Fibres Facility will process the recovered materials through actual textile manufacturing stages and assess product applications, with the partners planning product demonstrations that let manufacturers evaluate recycled inputs hands-on.

Hurren framed this as a response to a structural shift. Australia's textile manufacturing industry contracted sharply in the 1990s after tariff removal, but he argues the economics have turned: rising shipping costs, renewable energy access, automation advances and global supply chain disruptions now make domestic manufacturing attractive.

"Industry doesn't have the specialised equipment that we have in our laboratory here. For them to explore whether onshoring is viable, they need to first put a toe in the water," Hurren said.

Chamberlin pointed to one segment with immediate scale potential: corporate uniforms. "If we can tackle secure decommissioning of uniforms, that opens up new opportunities for the textile recycling industry," she said, noting that pilot-scale capability is critical to proving concepts worth scaling.

For sourcing teams and suppliers, the decision this forces is straightforward: brands with Australian take-back schemes or uniform contracts now have a domestic pilot partner that can test whether recovered fibre meets garment-grade specs — before anyone commits capital.