When you go running in the woods in your running tights, elastane is the reason they fit you so comfortably. Elastane is an elastic material that allows the fabric to stretch and adapt to your body. But when elastane fibers are mixed with cotton, wool, nylon or other fibers, as is the case in many clothes today, the clothes become almost impossible to recycle. It is extremely difficult to separate out the different fibers, and therefore the materials in the clothes cannot be recycled.
But this may change, says Assistant Professor Steffan Kvist Kristensen from the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center at Aarhus University. Together with a number of colleagues, he is behind a new technology that can separate out fibers in mixed fabrics. “We’ve developed a method to remove elastane completely from nylon,” he says. “In other words, we can disassemble the fabric so that we can recycle far more textiles in the future.”
