At the Univ. of Delaware, materials engineers have devised a chemical recycling method to separate artificial fibers like nylon from natural ones like cotton, promising a potentially breakthrough way to recycle clothing.
The fashion and textile industries account for around 10% of all world landfill waste, much of which isn’t recyclable. Polyester, spandex, and nylon textiles shed microplastics into the environment constantly, and most municipal recycling facilities don’t have the equipment to handle them.
At least as a whole there are methods of recycling these clothes, but when the fibers are combined with cotton or wool, they become impossible to recycle.
“We need a better way to recycle modern garments that are complex, because we are never going to stop buying clothes,” Erha Andini, a chemical engineer at the University of Delaware, told MIT’s Tech Review. “We are looking to create a closed-loop system for textile recycling.”
Andini is the lead author of a study on a process she’s pioneering, which is out today in Science Advances, that uses a solvent to break the chemical bonds in polyester and nylon, and cause the artificial threads to fall away from the natural ones. This allows for ideal recycling conditions in which both threads can be returned to this closed-loop system.
Using simple microwave energy to activate the solvent, the process is cheaper and more efficient as regards energy consumption.
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Challenges still exist—some of the recycled artificial fibers have come out too degraded for further use, meaning the process loses significant value on the resale of the recycled product. The second issue is that while energy consumption is low, the solvent is noticeably expensive.
But having been awarded a fellowship for entrepreneurialism, Andani isn’t just a chemical engineer—she is focused on bringing the method to the market.
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“Hopefully, once we are able to get pure components from each part, we can transform them back into yarn and make clothes again,” she says. “It’ll be a matter of having the capital or not, but we’re working on it and excited for it.”
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