92 million tons of textiles are discarded globally each year. That’s a huge problem. But UMD Associate Professor Abbie Clarke-Sather, PhD, and her team have created a new way to make textiles more recyclable.
Clarke-Sather, an associate professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD), has worked in Civil and Environmental Engineering as well as Fashion and Apparel Studies. It’s that fusion that first sparked the idea to address sustainability issues in the fashion industry.
Many consumers don’t want their extra textiles to end up in the landfill, so they choose to donate them instead of throwing them in the garbage. Organizations like True North Goodwill receive those donations, and, while they sort and resell what they can, ultimately there are more textiles than they can deal with. So Clarke-Sather is partnering with True North Goodwill to innovate ways to handle surplus textiles, improving sustainability while also getting more value from those unwanted materials.
Over the past six years, Clarke-Sather has been developing a new recycling machine, unlike anything else in use today. It’s something she and graduate student Paulo Alves call the Fiber Shredder, patent pending. The device shreds existing textiles back down to fibers in 90 seconds. Unlike similar machines already on the market that cut fibers, the Fiber Shredder pulls them apart, keeping them longer and therefore easier to re-spin back into yarns and other materials.
Now that she and her team have a working prototype, Clarke-Sather hopes to scale it up for commercial use. Her goal? See the machine in every Goodwill and thrift store across the country, even in municipalities’ recycling programs and sustainability conscious clothing brands that want to better handle their own waste. By helping to close the loop on a circular economy, she sees the potential for her research to make a real difference in that 92 million ton problem.
“My advice to researchers and students that want to make an impact on the world is to start looking around,” said Clarke-Sather. “There are so many problems. Just pick one and try to figure out a solution.”