New Life for Old Clothes

Apr-04-17 A liquid salt mixture could be the solution to recycling old clothes and giving fast fashion a new life.

Typically, clothing is hard to recycle because it is made up of fabric blends, such as cotton/polyester. To address the problem, a team from Aalto University created a way to melt the clothing using an ionic liquid previously used to dissolve cellulose from wood pulp. Submerging the clothing in the ionic liquid dissolved the cotton to a cellulose solution, allowing the polyester to be filtered out and the cellulose solution spun into usable fibers.

The team is now looking at ways to recapture the polyester as well as the dye, and hope to eventually scale the process up for commercial use.

More Info about this Invention:

[NEWATLAS.COM]
[ACS.ORG]

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