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

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

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

    165 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

    Funding

    This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 646226 . The authors also gratefully acknowledge Dr. Ali Harlin, Dr. Christiane Laine, and Dr. Sari Asikainen (VTT, Finland) for their support in material pretreatment and in the analysis of PET as well as Dr. Zengwei Guo (RISE IVF, Sweden) for his expertise regarding the recyclability of PET. We also thank Hilda Zahra (Aalto University, Finland) for conducting the TGA measurements. Appendix A

    Keywords

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

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