Good news on the Recycling Front (recycling the polyester in cotton/poly blend fabrics): recent science.
Yesterday (27 September, 2023) I watched this video: Why you can't Recycle Your Pants (until now). And it gave me a reason to be potentially optimistic.
Summary: Getting into the nitty-gritty of the chemistry science (with molecular diagrams and all), the video host explains why it is so hard to recycle so much cotton/polyester blend fabrics (which is why so many clothes, and other fabrics, end up in landfills).
Basically, in order to recycle polyester (a poly-mer), you have to break it down into a mono-mer, so you can put the bits back together into a new polymer. But in a cotton/polyester blend fabric, we haven't been able to do that without destroying the cotton fibers, and ending up with waste, anyway.
In this video, the host goes through an article from ACS: Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering (17 July, 2023) and describes the experiment of how scientists managed to break down polyester in a cotton blend fabric -- without destroying the cotton.
And then, he tries to replicate their experiment, and (after a couple of tries), appears to succeed -- in his own kitchen, using a cut up tee-shirt and a toaster oven.
This technique has not been scaled up -- yet -- and is not a ready solution -- yet. But it's a big step in the right direction.
under 15 minutes.
Eye contact.
Science formulae
Properly closed captioned
From PBS