This is quite cool, a jeans recycling facility that manages to recycle the *dye* - something that very frequently gets ignored in recycling processes (and is responsible for a lot of pollution): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV_-yJ6NiP8
*And* they use lasers for patterning instead of chemicals, awesome!
Something else to note (not in the video) is that recycling dyes and otherwise reducing wastewater is typically something that barely any attention is paid to with the recycling that happens in NA/EU. Other countries are much further ahead on this.
There are very similar issues with plastic recycling - there's only a few recycling processes used in NA/EU that require low or little water, and they're typically only used for manufacturing 'low-grade goods' (think plastic bollards).
(The water-less plastic recycling processes I've seen seem to always boil down to some form of "press the pellets into a new shape under high pressure and temperature", which isn't a very flexible manufacturing method)
