Upcycling of cotton polyester blended textile waste to new man-made cellulose fibers

Simone Haslinger, Michael Hummel, Adina Anghelescu-Hakala, Marjo Määttänen, Herbert Sixta

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

    67 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    The creation of a circular economy for cellulose based textile waste is supported by the development of an upcycling method for cotton polyester blended waste garments. We present a separation procedure for cotton and polyester using [DBNH] [OAc], a superbase based ionic liquid, which allows the selective dissolution of the cellulose component. After the removal of PET, the resulting solution could be employed to dry-jet wet spin textile grade cellulose fibers down to the microfiber range (0.75–2.95 dtex) with breaking tenacities (27–48 cN/tex) and elongations (7–9%) comparable to commercial Lyocell fibers made from high-purity dissolving pulp. The treatment time in [DBNH] [OAc] was found to reduce the tensile properties (<52%) and the molar mass distribution (<51%) of PET under certain processing conditions.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)88-96
    Number of pages9
    JournalWaste Management
    Volume97
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Sept 2019
    MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

    Keywords

    • Cellulose PET separation
    • Dry-jet wet spinning
    • Ioncell
    • Ionic liquid
    • Polyethylene terephthalate
    • Textile recycling

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