The proof-of-principle study offers hope for unsustainable apparel, textile, and footwear industries that jointly produce 20% of global solid waste. In countries of Asia and Africa, several alleged recyclers end up dumping textiles as trash illegally.
Hinestroza is also a director of the Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory in the College of Human Ecology.
The paper was published on March 30th, 2023, in the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. It explains the process of cutting textiles into pieces and decomposing them chemically into a soup of dyes, raw materials, additives, esters, and dirt. A metal solution is included and building blocks from the polyester share an affinity with the metal, and selectively link metal compounds together, producing tiny cages (known as metal-organic frameworks) that stay at the bottom of the soup.
Then, the formed cages are used to make coatings, which might need negligible structural tweaks to customize each to particular applications. These might comprise coatings that make antibacterial surgical gowns or scrubs, permanent press shirts that do not wrinkle, or baby or industrial clothes that need fire-retardant protection.
“One goal of my lab is to create a universal coating that will serve all these purposes, though we are still far away from that,” Hinestroza adds.
Yelin Ko is the study’s first author and a doctoral student in the field of human-centered design. Before this study, some thought the impurities and dyes in the mix would obstruct the process; however, this proof-of-principle of the approach—called controlled crystallization—reveals that the polyester-derived linkers can search for and bind to metal compounds in solution, despite other existing materials.
The study explains a closed-loop process, where thrown-away materials may be repurposed and add up to a circular economy—a focus for several sustainability scientists at Cornell, Hinestroza added.
Co-authors of the study are Phillip Milner, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Tyler Azbell, a doctoral student in Milner’s laboratory.
National Science Foundation partially funded this study.
Journal Reference:
Ko, Y., et al. (2023). Upcycling of Dyed Polyester Fabrics into Copper-1,4-Benzenedicarboxylate (CuBDC) Metal–Organic Frameworks. Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. doi.org/10.1021/acs.iecr.3c00226.