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The fashion industry has contributed much to the world's waste volume, but a new method has been discovered that could potentially make clothes recyclable.
Chemical Recycling to Address Fashion Industry Waste
In a new study, researchers discovered a novel way to break down fabrics and transform the material into reusable molecules. The process works even if the item contains a mixture of materials.
Chemical recycling may breathe fresh vitality into worn-out materials. A large portion of recycling is physically sorting waste into raw materials. However, this method is not suitable for handling textiles. Various materials are combined to create fabrics, such as cotton, and synthetic fibers like polyester. Multi-fiber textiles are difficult to sort into items that mechanical recycling processes can reuse. However, per Dionisios Vlachos, an engineer at the University of Delaware in Newark, the quality of what you get is lower.
The researchers used chemical recycling to disassemble some synthetic fabric components into modular pieces that can be reused. They employed a chemical process known as microwave-assisted glycolysis, which, with heat and a catalyst, can split long molecular chains, or polymers, into smaller pieces.
This was used to process fabrics of various compositions, such as 50/50 polycotton, a blend of polyester and cotton, and 100% polyester.
The reaction transformed ninety percent of the polyester in pure polyester fabric into a molecule known as BHET, which can be recycled straight into additional polyester textiles. According to the researchers' findings, it was able to break down the polyester and recover the cotton in polyester-cotton materials. The reaction did not affect cotton. Most importantly, the group reduced the reaction conditions to the point where the procedure only required 15 minutes, thus reducing the cost.
According to Vlachos, it usually takes days to break them down, but chemical recycling can do it in minutes. He was hopeful to speed it up and go down into seconds.
Additionally, the team hoped to develop the process further and scale it to treat more significant quantities of clothing. Vlachos and his associates calculated that 88% of apparel worldwide might be recycled with additional advancements.
Fashion Industry Waste
Fast fashion waste contributes to nearly 10% of global carbon emissions. It also requires a huge amount of resources.
Textile production requires land and water to cultivate cotton and other fibers. Estimates suggest that 2,700 liters of fresh water are enough to cover one person's drinking needs for 2.5 years to produce a single cotton T-shirt.
In 2020, the third-largest contributor to land use and water degradation was the textile industry.
Each EU resident needed an average of 391 kg of raw materials, 400 square meters of land, and nine cubic meters of water to make clothing and shoes that year. Unfortunately, millions of clothes end up in landfills daily.
Thus, chemical recycling will be handy, especially if it is developed to take on large quantities of clothing and make it available worldwide.
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