Out of the box.. A new patent for separating polyester from cotton

Out of the box..New patentFor separating polyester from cotton

The climate challenges that our planet is currently experiencing – due to increasing growth rates and the expansion of industrial and agricultural areas – have created the need to find innovative solutions to transform our various activities into sustainability. These are the solutions that we are trying to highlight in the series of articles “Outside the Box”.

Perhaps among the industries that consume energy and materials are:The clothing industryand textiles; In addition to being a vital industry of great importance in our daily lives, its severe environmental impacts have drawn attention to the necessity of transforming it into sustainability, whether by increasing the efficiency of its production processes, or by making optimal use of the many wastes that it produces.

In this context,CIRC, a company based in the United States, has invented an innovative way to recycle fabrics made of polyester mixed with cotton, which constitute up to 50% of the total clothing waste around the world.

Environmental footprint of the clothing industry

To know how dangerous clothing waste is, it is enough to say: The fashion industry is responsible for generating 92 million tons of waste every year, which iswastethat is burned or even randomly disposed of, as only less than 1% of this huge amount is recycled.

The other problem here is that the process of manufacturing new textiles is considered a resource and energy-intensive process. For example,Cotton productionaround the world requires – annually – 3.3 million acres of land and six billion cubic meters of water, while polyester production consumes 70 million barrels of oil every year.

Although the excessive consumption of textiles – especially in the era of fast fashion in which we live – remains a major challenge to transforming the fashion industry into sustainability; We find a greater challenge, which is the technical obstacles that stand in the way of recycling clothing waste.

One example of an obstacle facing recycling is the waste of polycotton, which is a synthetic blend of natural cotton fibers and synthetic plastic polymers. Polycotton waste takes about 200 years to decompose – biologically – in nature, while disposing of this waste by burning produceschemicals, such as: carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and other toxic compounds.

A revolutionary way to recycle

To face the previous challenge, the American company CIRC developed a revolutionary method; To recyclepolycotton. The new method safely separates the polyester completely from the cotton fibers, and this is through a thermal process that uses water to transform the polyester into a completely separated liquid, while the cotton fibers remain intact.

This revolutionary, patented method provides a model solution for the clothing and textile industry, as we can reuse the separated polyester again, to produce new clothes, as well as cotton. Which means reducing the increasing demand for virgin resources, and significantly reducing carbon dioxide emissions __EG_PH_52.

It seems that the new technology is achieving great success, as the company has converted more than 103 tons oftextile waste into raw materials again, which in turn has prevented the emission of an amount of up to 130,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide.

Within the next three years, CIRC plans to establish a recycling plant with a capacity of 60 thousand tons – annually – of textile waste. By 2030, the company will have doubled its production capacity to 300 thousand tons. Which contributes to putting the textile industryon the path towards a circular economy.

We are in dire need of such innovations, which can deal – immediately and urgently – withour climate problems. Perhaps the model that we presented in this article is one of the inspiring models that can transform waste from a heavy environmental burden into a renewable resource.

We atGuardians of the Earthbelieve in the importance and necessity of encouraging innovation in all fields, especially when addressing climate issues, and there is no doubt that the transformation of the clothing and textile industry to sustainability is something we must strive to achieve inour dear homeland.