The EU burns or buries 60 truckloads of textiles every minute, which translates to more than 4.3 million tonnes every year, or 74 per cent of the 5.8 million tonnes discarded annually. Globally, less than 1 per cent of clothes are recycled back to clothing.
A project team led by Dr Susan Kelleher of DCU’s School of Chemical Sciences has received €2.4 million from the Research Ireland National Challenge Fund to develop a solution to this problem, which involves converting post-consumer textiles into useful products such as foam insulation for buildings.
Funded by the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility, the National Challenge Funds calls on researchers to identify problems related to Ireland’s green transition and digital transformation and work directly with those most affected to solve them.
Dr Kelleher explains that chemical recycling of polymers, including polyester, allows for the complete recovery of high-value atoms and molecules, which can be used to make a wide range of materials.
READ MORE
The PUreTex project focuses on chemically recycling polyester waste textiles to recover the raw materials needed to synthesise rigid insulation foams for buildings. Although mechanical recycling of polyester is well established, chemical recycling that yields high-purity materials suitable for insulation production remains undeveloped.
A further challenge is that most textiles are not designed with recycling in mind when they get to their end of life. The PUreTex team brings together scientists, industry partners, community leaders, policymakers, and the public to drive meaningful change in how textiles are used and managed sustainably in Ireland. This includes collaborations with Dr Aimee Byrne and Dr John Gallagher at Trinity College Dublin, Dr Emma Delemere from DCU’s School of Psychology, and the Rediscovery Centre in Ballymun, spanning expertise across the textile waste and insulation industries, psychology, and community engagement.
The initial idea for PUreTex came to her while she was giving a lecture to students on textiles and polymers. “I was thinking about the atoms in clothes, and they are the same atoms that are in oil,” she recalls. “A lot of textiles are made from oil, which is often called liquid gold. If we could recover the atoms and turn them into something useful, it would be very valuable.”
She says that about 60 per cent of foam insulation is made from oil. “It’s really good but it’s not renewable. I wanted to make the same material in a more sustainable way.”
The design of textiles is critically important. “A lot of textiles are super-complicated chemically and this makes them more difficult to bring them back to their building blocks. Polyester is very straightforward; the problem is when it is mixed with other materials. If you have elastane, cotton or other materials in there it makes it super-complicated.”
She uses the analogy of turning butter back into milkb which gets much more complicated with garlic butter. “When you get back to milk you will get a tinge of garlic due to impurities. It’s really hard to separate it to get back to milk again.”
“No one wants to go back to gym wear that’s not elastic, but can we influence designers so that we are not making overcomplicated materials?” she says. “We held workshops with designers in the Rediscovery Centre in conjunction with NCAD and Coláiste Dhúlaigh. We were looking at ways of designing textiles to be able to break them down chemically without a great amount of effort.”
The aim is to seed the ideas early to influence the designers of the future to choose fabrics that are more sustainable and recyclable. The message is that sustainable doesn’t just necessarily mean natural fibres or recycled materials, it also means what happens when the material reaches its end of life.
This is not just a case of facilitating the recycling process. It also matters because the higher the purity of the atoms and molecules recovered, the higher the value of the products made from them.
“We want to be able to take the atoms and make them into higher-value products,” she says. “We might even be able to make pharmaceutical molecules and biomedical materials. You can make a lot of contact lenses from one jumper.
“The main thing we’ve done so far is demonstrated the production of thermal insulation materials with my kids’ pyjamas. We are also demonstrating capacity to make different types of material. We are looking at different blends and have demonstrated how we can separate cotton and polyester. We have also come up with a new way of getting rid of dye.”
The funding will allow Kelleher and the PUreTex team to further develop the project over the next two years. “The support from Research Ireland allows us to expand in new directions,” she says. “To get support at this scale is unprecedented in Ireland. Challenge funding brings people together from different fields. Projects like this would not be possible without this funding.”
