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 |
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