A t-shirt print is a recycling decision
- Apr 16
- 3 min read
There is a moment, usually at the worst possible time, when you realise a print is not just a print. It is the crackle on a favourite tee that turns from “vintage” into “flaking”. It is the sticky patch on a hoodie after too many dryer cycles. It is the logo on workwear that still looks sharp while the fabric underneath has started to thin. Prints are memory, identity, brand, belonging; often the whole reason we keep a garment in the first place. They are also a material choice that follows the textile all the way to the end.
When people picture textile recycling, they tend to picture fibres: cotton, polyester, viscose, i.e. threads you can somehow reclaim and spin again. But a printed textile is not just fibres. It is fibres plus a layer of chemistry designed to stay put through friction, sweat, sunlight, detergent, stretching and years of wear. That layer has pigments, binders, plasticisers, additives, sometimes thick enough that you can feel it with your fingertips. And when that garment enters a recycling stream, that layer does not politely step aside. It goes in too.
A recycling process depends on clean streams. The more “foreign” material you carry into it, the more you risk contaminating what you are trying to recover. In practice, prints can be the difference between recovering a fibre that can re-enter textile production and getting a lower-value output or a process that becomes too messy to run reliably.
BioSusTex treats printing as one of those invisible bottlenecks that quietly decides whether circularity stays theoretical or becomes routine. The project focuses on developing PVC-free, bio-based print formulations that aim to maintain performance while reducing problematic components and, crucially, to build in a removability / de-inking pathway as a feature rather than an afterthought.
The default assumption in printing has long been permanence: make it stick. Make it durable. Make it survive industrial laundering and repeated abrasion. The better an ink system is at doing that, the more it can behave like an impurity later. If you want fibre-to-fibre recycling to work at scale, it is not enough to have a “less bad” ink. You need an ink system that can do two things that sound contradictory:
perform like a high-quality print during use, and
behave like something you can remove when you are trying to reclaim the textile.
A “better ink”, in this framing, is not just a different ingredient list. It is a different lifecycle logic.
BioSusTex puts particular emphasis on moving away from common legacy systems used in textile printing, especially plastisol-style approaches associated with PVC, and towards bio-based alternatives. It is clear that performance matters: prints must remain printable, durable and compatible with real manufacturing processes (screen printing is a major focus), not only look good in a lab demo. And then comes the part that makes the whole thing more than a materials substitution project: the trigger.
If a print is meant to be removable later, you have to define what “later” looks like. You cannot have a print that peels off during wear. The removability has to be activated intentionally, during a recycling step, without damaging the fibre you are trying to recover, and without introducing new hazards or burdens. That is why a focus in BioSusTex is about engineering a mechanism for removal (a planned de-inking approach), rather than simply hoping a new ink will “behave better” at end of life. This is one of those places where circularity stops being a moral argument and becomes a design specification.
A print that can be removed cleanly has knock-on effects everywhere: it can reduce contamination, improve the quality of recovered fibres and make recycling routes more robust across the messy variability of post-consumer textiles. It also changes incentives. If recyclers can reliably handle printed textiles, brands and manufacturers do not have to choose between strong visual design and circularity. They can have both, because the system has been designed to cope with what real garments actually are.
There is another reason BioSusTex’s approach matters: printing is a major interface between textiles and the environment during use. Prints abrade. They age. They crack and shed. BioSusTex treats printed layers as something that should be designed more responsibly across the full lifecycle, not only for the moment it looks good on a shop floor. In other words: the print is not decoration sitting on top of a “real” garment. It is part of the garment’s material identity.