3D printing is currently blooming in a lot of different industries, including fashion in the form of 3D printing onto textiles. In parallel, fashion circularity is an increasing movement that has emerged due to the negative impact that fashion creates on the life on this planet and the planet itself. Therefore, a shift to responsible consumption and production methods (sustainable development goal 12) is necessary. To join this circularity movement, 3D printing onto textiles for fashion is required to fulfil certain requirements, including recycling. However, recycling is nowadays hindered by the lack of methods to separate the 3D printed structures from the textile at the End of Life (EoL). This graduation project researches the possibilities to achieve material separation at the EoL, so that the materials can be independently recycled and turned into new products.

The contribution of this research is a framework to achieve material separation that enables recycling for interfaces created by 3D printing onto textiles. This framework has three key steps, which are: developing a separation plan, selecting materials and designing the polymer-textile connection. The separation happens through heat deformation and more specifically, through increasing the temperature locally during separation. The selected materials are PLA, as the polymer, and plain-woven cotton, as the textile. The printing method used is Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM). The connection design is implemented on a product application, which is a footwear’s mid-sole bond to the upper shoe’s textile. Four interface designs are tested on separation conditions related to EoL and a scenario of usage conditions, to investigate the effect of the connection design on separation and thereafter, recycling. At the end of the research, clean material separation between polymer and textile is achieved, which is a promising achievement for reversible 3D printing onto textiles.