Wednesday, March 17, 2021

High performance fabric that can be made from plastic bags

Plastic scare meets human ingenuity! If you can turn polyethylene into human wearable fabrics, could it be turned into something else as well?

"... In the new research, however, [researchers] discovered that the hydrophobicity can be mitigated simply by melt-spinning the polymer into micrometre-diameter fibres. This partially oxidises the surface, making it barely hydrophilic. ‘It’s just enough to make it wick water through by capillary force, but the interior of the fibre is still deeply hydrophobic,’ ...
Moreover, the structural simplicity of polyethylene gives the textiles much higher infrared transparency than fabrics woven from more complex polymers, allowing for better radiative cooling. ..."

"... The team’s dry-coloring process contributes to the relatively small ecological footprint that polyethylene would have if it were used to make textiles, the researchers say. ...
It doesn’t get dirty because nothing sticks to it,” Boriskina says. “You could wash polyethyelene on the cold cycle for 10 minutes, versus washing cotton on the hot cycle for an hour.” ..."

"... We engineered PE fibres, yarns and fabrics to achieve efficient water wicking and fast-drying performance which, combined with their excellent stain resistance, offer promise in reducing energy and water consumption as well as the environmental footprint of PE textiles in their use phase. ..."

High performance fabric that can be made from plastic bags could slash fashion’s huge emissions | Research | Chemistry World A new textile produced by US researchers from polyethylene – the simplest and cheapest of all polymers – shows superior cooling properties to cotton or linen, is more stain resistant than polyester, is easily recyclable and can potentially be made from recycled materials.

Could we recycle plastic bags into fabrics of the future? Engineers have developed self-cooling fabrics from polyethylene, a material commonly used in plastic bags.

Here is a link to the underlying research paper:



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