Elastane recycling could give stretch clothing a second life
At the Textile Exchange Conference 2026, The LYCRA Company showcases Renewable LYCRA® fiber and its progress in advancing textile-to-textile recycling (photo: The LYCRA Company)
A collaboration between Triumph, RadiciGroup and The LYCRA Company addresses a problem familiar to readers of our recent article, The thread that could make stretchy clothes recyclable. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are exploring polyethylene-based elastic yarn designed for easier recovery. This industrial project pursues another route: recovering conventional elastane from blends manufacturers already use.
Ahead of the Textile Exchange Conference in Vancouver on 12–16 October, LYCRA highlighted progress with its recycling partners. The project remains at the pilot stage but the partners have taken some significant steps towards realising their ambition, which is to develop a functioning recovery chain from separating fibres to making new clothing.
LYCRA’s history and the environmental footprint of elastane
The LYCRA name dates back to 1958, when DuPont chemist Joseph Shivers invented a stretch fibre that offered a lighter alternative to rubber threads in foundation garments. It subsequently found its way into swimwear, sportswear, underwear and jeans. Today, The LYCRA Company, headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, supplies fibre technologies to textile manufacturers across the globe through brands that include COOLMAX and THERMOLITE in additgion to LYCRA; the latter is also known as spandex.
The comfort those fibres provide comes with an environmental burden. Conventional elastane relies on fossil-derived chemical ingredients and energy-demanding manufacturing. In dry spinning, a widely used production method, heated gas evaporates solvent from a polymer solution to form solid filaments. Solvent recovery adds further processing requirements.
LYCRA is making efforts to reduce that footprint. In its 2022 sustainability update, the company reported environmental self-assessments across all six LYCRA fibre plants, with three independently verified. Recovering textile material tackles another part of the challenge: preserving value that has already required resources to create.
How textile-to-textile elastane recycling works
Textile-to-textile recycling turns waste textiles into material for new fibres. For stretch fabrics, the first task is separating fibres with different properties. Elastane gives a fabric stretch and recovery, while nylon or polyester provides other characteristics, including strength. A useful recycling process needs to recover materials suitable for further manufacturing.
In the Triumph collaboration, Radici InNova, RadiciGroup’s research and innovation business, used selective dissolution to separate nylon and elastane from surplus fabric. The principle is to dissolve a selected polymer while leaving other components separate, allowing the materials to be recovered through different processing steps.
LYCRA’s role follows separation. It validates recovered elastane and uses a proprietary solvent-based process to blend it with virgin polymer and spin new stretch fibre.
Across its wider pilot programmes, LYCRA reports fibres containing 20–40% recycled elastane; that range is not a stated composition for the Triumph prototype. Those figures describe the elastane fibre itself. For a hypothetical fabric containing 10% elastane, using stretch fibre with 40% recycled content would contribute 4% recovered elastane to the fabric’s total weight. Recycled nylon or polyester could increase the overall recycled share.
For those pilot fibres, recovered polymer replaces part of the virgin input. The garment demonstration shows how such recovery can connect with the next stages of manufacturing.
What the recycled-fibre prototype demonstrates
Triumph confirmed the prototype lingerie project in December 2025 and said it would explore a possible capsule collection while assessing traceability and end-of-life requirements. Together, the partners had succeeded in producing 60 metres of black fabric from the recovered yarns, which Triumph used for the lingerie set.
There are other initiatives to recycle stretch fabric. French recycler Recyc’Elit says it has separated elastane from polyester–elastane feedstocks through Fashion for Good’s Stretching for Circularity project. Its process targets polyester recovery while preserving companion materials for further use.
Although the processes differ, they share a practical requirement: buyers for each recovered fraction. Recovering nylon or polyester leaves a gap if the separated elastane cannot return to production.
From manufacturing waste to discarded stretch clothing
Finding those buyers is only part of building a working system. Factory waste provides a relatively controlled starting point for its material supply. Production batches can offer information about fibre composition and processing history. Discarded garments introduce more variation, alongside the need to collect and sort suitable feedstock.
LYCRA identifies post-consumer clothing as a further objective. Extending the process to that waste stream will require evidence that it can accommodate the effects of wear and the variety of dyes, finishes and additional components in discarded garments.
The same expansion must satisfy environmental and commercial tests. Recovery yields, energy consumption and solvent reuse determine how much benefit the process delivers. Consistent fibre quality, dependable supply and acceptable prices determine whether manufacturers adopt it.
Renewable LYCRA fibre and recycled elastane
While textile-to-textile elastane recycling awaits commercialisation, LYCRA is already producing Renewable LYCRA fibre commercially, with 70% plant-based content using US-grown corn as a feedstock. The company cites a third-party-reviewed life-cycle assessment indicating a carbon-footprint reduction of up to 45% against LYCRA fibre made with the fossil-derived version of a key polymer ingredient, PTMEG (polytetramethylene ether glycol).
That claim concerns the fibre under the assessment’s conditions, rather than an entire garment. Renewable inputs replace some fossil-derived ingredients; recycling seeks to retain material after production and use. Both can contribute to reducing impact, but plant-based content alone establishes no recycling pathway.
For textile-to-textile elastane recovery, the next meaningful milestone is repeated production using more varied waste streams, supported by data on material quality, environmental impact and economics.
The prototype underwear shows that recovered stretch material can travel back through a manufacturing chain. Turning that demonstration into a dependable source of fibre would give clothing makers something more useful than a promising sample: a recovery route they can build into everyday production.
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