The Cost of Comfort in Workwear: Why Blended Fabrics Are Hard to Recycle
- Gianni Romano
- Jun 18
- 6 min read
In our pursuit of durable, breathable, and cost-effective garments, the textile industry has leaned heavily on blended fabrics, especially in sectors like workwear where comfort must meet performance. Blends like polycotton and cotton/nylon offer the best of both worlds: the ruggedness of synthetics with the breathability of natural fibres.
But while these combinations solve performance problems, they create a new one - recycling.
This article explores the rise of blended textiles in workwear, the environmental hurdles they pose, and what circular alternatives might look like.
What Are Blended Fabrics?
Blended fabrics are textiles made by combining two or more types of fibres to achieve a balance of performance, comfort, and cost-efficiency that is often difficult to obtain with a single material. In the workwear industry—where garments must withstand harsh environments, frequent laundering, and long hours of wear—blends are especially popular for offering tailored functionality.
The most common blends used in workwear include:
Polycotton (polyester/cotton): Polycotton is a hybrid fabric, made often in ratios such as 65/35 or 50/50. It is widely used in uniforms, shirts, jackets, and trousers because it combines the durability, wrinkle-resistance, and quick-drying properties of polyester with the breathability, comfort, and natural feel of cotton. The result is a fabric that holds up well in industrial wash cycles, resists shrinkage, and retains its shape over time—all while remaining comfortable against the skin.
Polycotton also has a lower moisture absorption rate compared to 100% cotton, making it more suitable for environments where sweat or liquid exposure is common. Its blend allows garments to dry faster, resist mildew, and require less ironing—advantages highly valued in commercial workwear programs.
Cotton/nylon: This blend leverages the softness and thermal comfort of cotton alongside the superior abrasion resistance, tensile strength, and elasticity of nylon. Common in tactical uniforms, military gear, and outdoor workwear, cotton/nylon fabrics are engineered for high-performance scenarios where movement, durability, and moisture control are critical.
Nylon adds stretch and resilience, enhancing comfort during physical activity and extending the lifespan of garments. It also improves moisture-wicking by drawing sweat away from the body and enabling quicker evaporation—vital in hot or physically demanding workplaces. At the same time, the cotton content maintains a natural feel and breathability, helping to reduce overheating.
Blended fabrics like these are favoured because they address multiple functional requirements simultaneously: toughness, comfort, and care performance. They are often more affordable than high-spec technical mono-materials and offer better cost-per-wear than natural fibres alone.
However, while these hybrid textiles offer a solution on the front end of a garment’s life, they create major complications at the back end—particularly for circularity and textile recycling.
Why Blends Are a Problem
Fibre Separation Challenges
The core challenge with blended fabrics lies in their incompatibility with existing recycling systems. Unlike pure materials, where recycling infrastructure is relatively mature (e.g., for 100% cotton or polyester), blended fabrics require fibre separation—a process that is neither widely available nor economically viable at scale today.
When fibres are spun, woven, and chemically finished together, they become physically and chemically entangled. This makes it difficult to isolate the individual components for reuse. The two main recycling methods struggle in different ways:
Mechanical Recycling: This involves shredding garments into fibres to be re-spun into yarn. While effective for mono-materials, mechanical recycling is poorly suited to blends. The mixed fibres produce short, weak, and inconsistent yarns, which limits their reuse to low-grade applications like insulation or stuffing. The original properties of the fibres are often lost, and additives or finishes (like coatings, dyes, or flame retardants) further complicate the process.
Chemical Recycling: These processes are designed to depolymerise or dissolve a specific fibre type (e.g., polyester) so it can be recovered in near-virgin form. However, chemical recycling is usually polymer-specific and struggles when the input material contains other fibre types, finishes, or contaminants. Cotton interferes with polyester recycling and vice versa. In many cases, the presence of a secondary fibre type, even at 10–20%, renders the recycling process inefficient or economically unfeasible.
The result is that blended garments are extremely difficult to recycle—especially in a way that supports closed-loop circularity, where fibres are recovered for the same quality application.
Blended Fabric Recycling
Because blended fabrics are hard to recycle properly, the vast majority are either:
Downcycled: Turned into lower-value materials like rags, acoustic insulation, car seat stuffing, or mattress filling. While this avoids immediate landfill, it does not support fibre-to-fibre recycling and represents a dead end in terms of textile value retention.
Landfilled or Incinerated: Particularly when garments are contaminated with flame retardants, PFAS coatings, or heavy soiling—all common in workwear—the cost and difficulty of separation often push waste handlers to incineration or landfill as the cheapest option. This not only wastes valuable fibre but also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and toxic chemical release.
According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, less than 1% of textiles are recycled into new clothing—a figure that is unlikely to improve significantly without scalable solutions for blended materials.
Why Blends Persist in Workwear
Despite their recycling challenges, blended fabrics remain deeply embedded in workwear product development for several reasons:
Performance requirements: Workers in demanding environments need abrasion resistance, tear strength, and moisture management.
Cost efficiency: Blends often outperform pure natural fibres in cost-per-wear.
Comfort: Cotton offers softness; synthetics like polyester or nylon add structure and wick moisture—crucial for long hours in variable climates.
Even sustainability-focused brands find themselves in a bind: switching to mono-materials often means compromising on performance, aesthetics, or cost. For garments that must meet specific EN or ISO standards, the material trade-offs can be particularly complex.
What Circular Alternatives Exist?
Mono-Materials: The Simplest Fix
Designing garments with a single fibre type simplifies recycling and enables circularity. For example:
100% polyester uniforms can be chemically recycled in polyester-focused systems.
100% cotton workwear can be mechanically recycled into new yarns or other applications.
However, mono-materials may lack the stretch, moisture-wicking, or abrasion resistance needed for demanding tasks—so compromises in performance may be necessary.
Emerging Fibre Separation Technologies
New R&D is attempting to bridge the gap between blended fabric utility and end-of-life recyclability, with several innovative companies pioneering fibre separation techniques:
Infinited Fiber Company and Renewcell are developing chemical recycling methods that recover cellulose from polycotton blends, transforming used textiles into new, high-quality fibres like Infinna™ or Circulose® that can be re-spun into yarn.
Worn Again Technologies is scaling a closed-loop chemical recycling process that separates and purifies polyester and cellulose from blended textiles. Their system targets post-consumer garments and aims to retain the material’s quality for reuse in new apparel.
Circ (formerly Tyton BioSciences) uses a hydrothermal process to break down polycotton fabrics into their base components—polyester and cellulose—both of which can be reclaimed and reused without significant degradation in performance.
Stuff4Life, based in the UK, focuses specifically on polyester workwear and uniforms, aiming to build a circular system for polyester garments used in industrial and commercial settings. Working in collaboration with industry partners like Arco, Stuff4Life uses chemical depolymerisation to turn end-of-life polyester garments back into raw materials for new textiles, helping close the loop in high-volume workwear sectors.
While these technologies are promising, they remain in the pilot or early commercial phases, and challenges like feedstock contamination, cost, and regional infrastructure gaps still limit widespread adoption. However, as regulations tighten and circularity becomes more urgent, these innovators are laying the groundwork for a future where blended fabrics can be responsibly recycled at scale.
Circular Design Strategies
Brands can also pursue circularity through design:
Design for Disassembly: Minimise trims, simplify construction, and use mono-material threads and labels.
Take-back Schemes: Encourage closed-loop recycling by collecting end-of-life garments and routing them through specialist recyclers.
Labeling for Sorting: Digital product passports and traceability tools (like Lyfcycle’s platform, Ettos) can help recyclers quickly identify fabric types and finishes, aiding efficient sorting and routing.
What Brands and Suppliers Should Do
Audit Your Fibre Mix - Understanding your product breakdown by fibre type is step one. Evaluate what percentage of your portfolio consists of blends, and whether alternatives could meet performance needs.
Choose Recyclable First - For products that don’t demand extreme performance, explore 100% polyester or 100% cotton options—especially in products that are high-volume and low-rotation.
Collaborate Across the Chain - Suppliers, recyclers, and technology providers must co-develop solutions. Fibre innovation and recycling technology must go hand in hand.
Be Transparent - Declare fibre compositions clearly. Use digital labels or QR codes to signal recyclability and composition for future processing.
How Lyfcycle Can Help
At Lyfcycle, we work with brands to balance performance, price, and planet. From workwear to outdoor gear, we source fabrics with circularity in mind—favouring mono-materials wherever possible and advising on trade-offs when blends are required.
If you’re rethinking your material strategy, we’re ready to help. Get in touch to speak with our team.
Get in touch to explore low-impact, future-ready alternatives for your next collection.
Editor’s Note
Ellen MacArthur Foundation: “A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future”
Textile Exchange: “Preferred Fiber & Materials Market Report”
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