The average American throws out around 81 pounds of clothing annually, and few recycling options exist for most textiles. MIT engineers have developed a new type of yarn they hope will reduce that waste by making garments easier to recycle.
The yarn mimics the stretchiness of conventional elastic yarns, which typically combine spandex with polyester or nylon. Those blends are hard to recycle because the fibers must be separated. The MIT team instead created a stretchy yarn from two variations of polyethylene, the material used in milk jugs and grocery bags. Since both variations come from the same chemical family, the yarn can be melted as is.
Svetlana Boriskina, who led the work as a research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, says a garment made from this material could be melted and spun into new yarn for a next generation of clothing. Even after 10 cycles of melting and respinning, the yarn stays as strong and flexible as conventional thread. “Now we have something that can be knitted and woven,” Boriskina says. “That is the next stage.”
The researchers hope that someday polyethylene garments could be dropped in collection bins and sent to recycling facilities, supporting a more sustainable, circular textile economy. The report is based on a single source, so no independent corroboration or conflicting views are noted here.