Western Australia trials firefighter uniform recycling with cotton

By James Calloway

Five collaborative design capsules were presented at Fremantle Design Week 2026, but RMIT disclosed no blend ratio (the proportions of each fibre in a yarn), fibre composition or processing volume for the Western Australian recycling project.

The project recovered fibres from retired fire-service uniforms and combined them with Kimberley cotton as part of an exploration of regional textile recycling and manufacturing.

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University doctoral researcher Lisa Piller leads the work under the “Walking in Circles” project, which examines circular and regenerative textile systems (here, the study of reused fibres alongside renewable regional inputs).

It uses decommissioned uniforms from Western Australia’s Parks and Wildlife Service. RMIT announced the initiative last week and says the uniform recycling work remains experimental.

At material level, Piller worked with researchers at the ARC Research Hub for Future Fibres on blending, carding and spinning. Carding aligns loose fibres; spinning twists fibres into yarn. Those steps produced experimental yarns and garments from recovered uniform material. The project paired those fibres with cotton from the first processing run of the region’s new cotton gin.

That cotton came from the Kimberley and could be processed within the region rather than travel thousands of kilometres interstate, according to RMIT. The arrangement links two regional inputs: discarded technical textiles (durable specialist garments) from park and wildlife operations, and agricultural fibre produced in northern Western Australia.

Piller said: “These uniforms have spent years protecting the firefighters who work to safeguard Western Australia’s forests, parks and wildlife. Rather than ending their life in storage or landfill, we’ve been exploring how those fibers can be recovered, reprocessed and transformed into entirely new garments.”

The resulting garments appeared at Fremantle Design Week 2026 within “Imagine: Material Stories,” an exhibition exploring alternative materials and circular design (designing products so discarded materials can re-enter production). Piller’s presentation comprised five collaborative design capsules. The capsules collectively incorporated Western Australian materials, including recovered uniforms, cotton, merino wool, seaweed and fibres derived from food waste.

The wider “Walking in Circles” project brings designers, researchers and material producers together to examine how regional resources might support fashion and textile development. RMIT lists the Parks and Wildlife Service, Kimberley Cotton Company, ThreadUp Australia and the ARC Research Hub for Future Fibres as collaborators.

The listed partners confirm research and design collaboration, not production supply: the announcement states no committed orders, garment run sizes, factory capacity, investment or commercial offtake terms (purchase commitments).

What can buyers verify?

RMIT’s release leaves the commercial scale unestablished: it gives no number of uniforms collected, tonnage of textile waste processed, recovered-fibre percentage or fibre-content breakdown for the source garments. It also cites no recycled-content certification, chain-of-custody records or legal sustainability standard against which buyers could verify the output.

What does this mean for sourcing?

For sourcing teams, the immediate decision is to treat the five capsules as design-development samples, not production feedstock (a scalable raw-material supply). Any move from prototype to contracted supply should wait for documented fibre composition, blend ratios, processing capacity and applicable certification or labelling requirements.

Until then, the project demonstrates a regional recovery-to-yarn route in Western Australia, but not a bankable supply of circular uniform fibre.