Did you say air filters from…discarded textiles?

Texile recycling is not a silver bullet to fashion sustainability and neither is textile-to-textile recycling to waste textiles. Waste textiles cannot be recycled indefinitely into new textile fibers because the polymers in the fibers are damaged during the recycling process. Moreover, a fraction of waste textiles is very difficult to recycle into new textile fibers because the polymers in them are rather short from the beginning, as is the case of viscose waste. This means that the material will need to leave the textile value chain sooner or later and therefore textile recyclers need to go beyond textile-to-textile recycling to avoid the eventual incineration of the material.

Many industrial sectors rely on the same raw materials as the fashion industry so they could become alternative applications and markets for textile recyclers. For example, air filters could be made of cellulose which is also the main component of cotton and viscose textile fibers. Thus, once the cellulose polymers are not suitable for fiber manufacturing anymore, they could still be used in the production of air filters to expand the lifetime of the material.

RISE and MoRe research demonstrated this concept and successfully produced air filter materials from one of our cellulose pulps, which was derived in its entirety from viscose waste. The air filter material seems very promising and its properties are currently being tested to determine the need for futher optimization. This exemplifies the potential win-win situations that textile recyclers could create by looking beyond fashion: filter manufacturers can replace their fossil-based feedstocks by biobased and recycled materials while fibers that need to leave the textile value chain find alternative outlets to keep creating value in the economy.

This research project is financed by the BioInnovation program, which is supported by Vinnova, the Swedish Energy Agency and Formas. The project is led by RISE and the other partners are MoRe Research, Raccoon miljöfilter, Oppigårds and ShareTex. More information about the project and its progress can be found at:

https://www.ri.se/en/what-we-do/projects/air-filter-from-recycled-bio-based-materials-biorefil