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 language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 88-96 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Waste Management |
Volume | 97 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Sept 2019 |
MoE publication type | A1 Journal article-refereed |
Keywords
- Cellulose PET separation
- Dry-jet wet spinning
- Ioncell
- Ionic liquid
- Polyethylene terephthalate
- Textile recycling