The information: Lower than 1% of clothes is recycled. Many of the relaxation finally ends up dumped in a landfill or burned. A workforce of researchers hopes to alter that with a brand new course of that breaks down mixed-fiber clothes into reusable, recyclable components with none sorting or separation upfront.
How they did it: Many clothes are product of a mixture of pure and artificial fibers. As soon as these fibers are mixed, they’re tough to separate. To sort out this drawback, the workforce used a solvent that breaks the chemical bonds in polyester cloth whereas leaving cotton and nylon intact. To hurry up the method, they energy it with microwave vitality and add a zinc oxide catalyst.Â
Why it issues: Whereas related strategies have been used to recycle pre-sorted plastic, that is the primary time they’ve been used to recycle mixed-fiber textiles with none sorting required. Learn the total story.
—Sarah Ward
What new hydropower tech says about local weather motion
Again at MIT Expertise Evaluation’s ClimateTech occasion in 2022, Gia Schneider, a cofounder of Natel Vitality, spoke about her firm’s mission to design hydropower generators which might be safer for fish.
As an example her level, she shared grisly photographs of fish that had been hit by typical turbine blades. However, the fish swimming by way of Natel’s generators appeared comparatively unbothered, curving across the blades and happening their merry means downstream.Â
Just lately, our local weather reporter Casey Crownhart had a chat with Schneider about how Natel is working to alter hydropower expertise and juggle local weather motion with freshwater ecosystems to make hydropower a bit extra fish-friendly. Learn the total story.
This story is from The Spark, our weekly e-newsletter masking improvements in local weather and vitality tech. Enroll to obtain it in your inbox each Wednesday.
