It looks and feels like children's playdough, but this colourful clay being made in a lab at Deakin University in Geelong, is actually old clothing.
For the past five years, scientists at the university's Institute for Frontier Materials have been trialling different methods to figure out the best way to recycle Australia's growing textile waste.
Now, they think they've found a way.
"What we've discovered is that we can take waste textiles and grind them up into really fine particles, which we can then use as a pigment to re-dye new textiles," Emma Prime, Deakin University's strategic research manager, said.
The scientists use existing mill machinery from agriculture and mining industries to crush fabric into what looks like fluff.
That material then goes into another machine that grinds it into a liquid using water.
The liquid can then be dried into a pigment paste, clay, or powder. Pigment is used to colour paint, plastic, and dye in clothing, but is often made from petrochemicals.
Six artists from around Victoria were given samples of the powder to use as paint.
Kiri Tawhai is a multi-media Indigenous artist in Geelong who usually paints with acrylic paint.
"I really like painting bright, bold colours. So when I first got the pigments, I realised that the blue wasn't quite blue, the red wasn't quite red," she said.
"I was just really eager to get it onto a white canvas to see what the colours would look like."
The colours were a little subdued, she said. But she was eager to use a product that was made from reused material.
"A lot of my culture is about making sure that I do right by country. You don't want to take too much, you want to be able to give back.
"There's this real feel for not leaving a big footprint, not using up resources. [I'm] using acrylic paint, that's plastic, so you've got to think that I'm putting a certain amount of plastic into the world.
"The idea of having a paint pigment that is from fast fashion … there was just something really amazing about that."
The pigment was also used to produce a line of T-shirts using the pigment as a paste to screen print designs.
Currently, only single-colour clothing can be crushed down, so textiles need to be manually cut and separated.
But lead scientist Rangam Rajkhowa said others in the textile recycling industry — mainly in Europe — were working on automating this process.
Separating different fibres and materials was also an issue — for the most part, the scientists could only break down textiles made from up to two materials, with polyester being one of the trickiest.
"Work is ongoing on [with blend materials] and there are promising results," Dr Rajkhowa said.
Clothing waste a growing problem
According to the Australian Fashion Council, about 210,000 tonnes of clothing is thrown away every year in Australia, and another 200,000 tonnes is donated.
The council's project director Danielle Kent said the work was encouraging.
"Right at our doorstep we have the ability to innovate, I think Australia underestimates how good we are at innovating," she said.
"But we have to scale, and that takes money and resources. We're starting with the right vision in mind, that textile-to-textile vision."
The federal government recently introduced a $1 million product stewardship scheme that would see a 4-cent levy added to every new garment sold in Australia. But it's not compulsory.
And the stewardship scheme does not yet answer the question of what the end products could be.
Ms Kent said Australia had already seen the consequences of not having end markets for recycled material with the collapse of soft-plastic recycler REDcycle.
"What we learned from REDcycle has been really valuable. You can't assume that the markets are just going to be there."
She said the work at Deakin was needed to "close the loop" but warned it wouldn't be a silver bullet.
"Australians are over-consuming and not valuing and reusing the clothes that already exist in their wardrobe. It's not just about textile waste at the end, it's about our purchasing behaviour and how we use our clothes and respect our clothes."
'Appetite to scale is here'
While using the pigment as a paint and screen-printing material has shown the uses of the product, the biggest issue preventing Deakin's work from going further has been scalability.
Ms Kent said government monetary support was needed to make the technology commercially viable.
"I think the appetite to scale is here. But there's a lot of work that needs to be done to secure large volumes of clothing so that the textile recyclers can build that infrastructure and know that that level of volume is secured.
"This is one part of the puzzle."
Ben Kaminsky is the co-founder of Textiles Recyclers Australia, a business that collects waste materials like clothes, sheets, and towels and crushes them down to be reused as furniture stuffing. The company received about 150 tonnes of waste textiles a month from fee-paying sources including charities unable to resell second-hand items.
The company partnered with Deakin University to supply the waste material.
Mr Kaminsky said he wanted to build a factory near the university to produce the pigment at scale.
"Pigment has a tremendous amount of potential uses so we feel it can go back into making topical paints, building products, we've got a lot of different pathways [in mind]," he said.
Ensuring the environment impacts of recycling are less than that of making a new product, is also a key consideration when recycling.
Dr Rajkhowa said his team was conducting a report to produce data on the sustainability of using the machines to crush clothing, and said the process used about 10 to 15 litres of water per kilogram of fabric.
He said it was possible for the majority of that water to be recovered in the dying process.