Upcycling Polyester to Curb Textile Waste
A team of Cornell University chemists and engineers has created a way to break down old polyester clothing and reuse some of its compounds to make a variety of new products — and to disrupt the cycle of textile waste proliferation. Learn more in this video about how upcycling polyester can help curb textile waste.
“Eventually, we are going to run out of space,” Hinestroza says. “We’re going run out of countries where we can send our textile garbage. The consequences are quite sad, but the solution is possible and it is in ourselves,” says Juan Hinestroza , the Rebecca Q. Morgan ’60 Professor of Fiber Science and Apparel Design in the College of Human Ecology.
Transcript
00:00:00 In the U.S. we buy about 69 pieces of clothing per year. 69, yeah? ...we just buy new and new stuff all the time. less than 10% of all the clothes that are made in the world are actually repurposed or recycled or reused Okay. So we are a materials science group specializing in textiles and fibers.
00:00:51 And the last few years, we became incredibly aware of the problems of the textile industry and the fashion industry. We mostly focus on polyester and cotton. So in the case of polyester, we focus because it's, the second most used fiber and actually is not biodegradable. And so the waste is generated stays there. There are many people working on how to replace polyester for some alternatives that are biodegradable. But we have already generated a huge amount of waste and that waste is not going to disappear.
00:01:24 So we have to address the reality. We have generated this waste, what do we do with that? One solution for handling textile waste proposed by Hinestroza and his team of researchers is to upcycle discarded clothing items into something known as Metal-Organic Frameworks, or MOFs. These compounds have a unique crystalline structure that allows them to be used for everything from capturing greenhouse gases to creating anti-wrinkle clothing. But to get from a discarded pair of gym clothes to a carbon sequestration system, you need to do a little bit of chemistry. the synthesis of metal-organic
00:02:05 frameworks are two parts. The first part is depolymerization of polyester fibers, which is to chop down polyester into, like, small components. And with the components, we drop metal and they can selectively find organic linkers in the soup and they can form metal-organic frameworks by self-assembly. So what exactly makes metal-organic frameworks such a unique and promising compound?
00:02:48 They have kind of a mathematical precision of what structure we are going to assemble based on the compounds that we do. You can have them to capture the pollutant in the air, capture the pollutant in the water, kill the bacteria, prevent the fire or prevent contamination by toxic compounds. And that's the beauty of these molecules, they’re incredibly versatile and they can be easily reproduced So, I’m so always amazed at the power of this molecule.
00:03:18 This is a very unique chemistry, and it’s changing the world.