Project
Towards a circular textile economy: enzymatic recycling of textile fibres
The recycling of textiles at their end-of-life is an important technical and societal challenge. A major difficulty in textile recycling is that textiles are often highly complex materials. Many are blends of more than one polymer, such as the biopolymer cellulose (e.g. cotton, linen) and synthetic polymers such as polyester, polyamide or elastane. This complex structure makes many textiles difficult to recycle, as it is hard to separate them into their individual components, which is necessary in order to process them into recycled fibres by mechanical methods. This project will explore a novel, enzymatic technology for the recycling of blended textile materials.
A potential solution to the recycling of blended textiles is back-to-monomer enzymatic recycling. Here, the constituent polymers that make up a textile material are depolymerised by hydrolytic enzymes to yield the monomeric building blocks of which the polymer is composed, which can subsequently be re-used. Enzymatic depolymerisation occurs under mild conditions and is potentially selective towards a single polymer, allowing it to be applied directly to mixed waste fractions such as blended textiles. In contrast, mechanical recycling requires highly pure polymers as starting material, and back-to-monomer recycling technologies based on chemical depolymerisation suffer from low selectivity making them less suitable for application on mixed waste streams.
In this project, we will explore combinations of hydrolytic enzymes known to hydrolyse polymers commonly found in textiles, such as cellulose and PET, with oxidative enzymes that may allow the polymer degradation rates to be enhanced. Combinations of substrate-specific enzymes will be employed to enable the selective depolymerisation of one or multiple targeted polymers found in mixed textile materials. In this way, we hope to develop a novel, mild technology for the recycling of blended textile materials.