How to turn old jeans into a new shirt
While denim has previously only been processed into cleaning rags, a team of researchers has now developed a method that can be used to produce clothing from denim trousers.
Around 50,000 tonnes of used clothing are collected in Switzerland every year - and the trend is rising. That's around six kilograms per person. These figures are not surprising. Because clothes are becoming cheaper and cheaper, we buy them in the shops more often than we would like.
As a result, it is not uncommon for unworn items to end up in the clothes collection. What many people don't realise: The discarded pieces are often not reprocessed into new clothes, but downcycled into low-quality products such as cleaning rags or rice wool. The reason for this is that most clothes are made from a mixed fabric. It is rare, for example, for a T-shirt to be made of 100 per cent pure cotton. This is because the thread that holds the individual parts together is usually made from a different material.
Separating the interwoven fibres is an impossible task. The process is expensive and complicated. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research (IAP) in Potsdam have now found a way to process blended fabrics. The solution is a viscose textile fibre made from recycled cotton.
A new raw material for viscose fibres
Because cellulose fibres cannot be melted and therefore cannot be spun, the possibilities for processing them are limited. For this reason, fibres have long been produced using the viscose process. This involves adding chemical substances to cellulose - a natural substance obtained from wood. The resulting semi-synthetic fibres are then processed into viscose, lyocell and modal.
In order to be able to produce natural fibres in the future, the IAP has investigated whether cellulose sheets made from recycled cotton - which was provided to the scientists by the Swedish start-up Renewcell - can be processed into viscose fibres. "By setting the right parameters in the dissolving and spinning process, such as effective filtration stages, we were able to dissolve out the foreign fibres contained in the pulp," explains André Lehmann, chemist at the IAP. The result is a plastic-free textile fibre that is several kilometres long and consists of 100 per cent cellulose.
In this way, old jeans can also be processed into new items of clothing or composted in future. The latter is possible because cellulose is biodegradable. The environmentally friendly yarn therefore also makes a small but significant article in the fight against microplastics
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