UNSW researchers find uses for textiles and other wastes

The increasing volume of post-consumer textile waste presents a substantial environmental challenge due to the complexity of recycling mixed and blended textile waste. Effective recycling necessitates precise sorting of textiles by material composition. However, current technologies remain limited in their ability to achieve this.

Now, researchers at the UNSW SMaRT Centre have published a study revealing multiple research findings around valuable new uses for textile and other wastes as sources of activated carbon for essential purification applications.

In its latest published report into creating activated carbon from waste textiles, the UNSW Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) Centre says the findings represent an important discovery and opportunity to boost sustainability of global purification and filtration systems, and to reduce the negative environmental impacts of conventional methods of manufacturing activated carbon.

This follows earlier SMaRT research that was also able to successfully and sustainably obtain activated carbon from waste streams such as end-of-life cotton products, wood and plastic components of automotive shredder residue (ASR), waste coffee grounds, and plastic from end-of-life flexible printed circuit boards (FPCB), for a variety of applications including noise attenuation and energy storage systems that rely on non-renewable resources.

The SMaRT Centre Director, Professor Veena Sahajwalla, said the new textile waste research findings, via SMaRT’s ARC Microrecycling Research Hub, are important and significant because they show far superior sustainability advantages over conventional methods of creating activated carbon used in countless purification and filtration systems across the world.

“We show it is very possible to not only help ameliorate the growing waste textiles problem being experienced globally, but to reform this waste stream usually destined for landfill into highly valued activated carbon materials that can be used in many purifications systems, such as for water, air, gas, food and beverage, as well as for numerous other crucial industrial applications,” she said. “The research was able to demonstrate a 36% reduction in embodied carbon and over 99% reduction in embodied energy demand relative to conventional coal-derived activated carbon, which has been an essential material created the world over for a wide variety of important and critical purifications systems.”

Activated carbon is a form of carbon obtained from natural, non-renewable resources that are specially treated with oxygen and manufactured to create a highly porous structure with an enormous internal surface area, making it an excellent material for filtering and purifying liquids and gases by trapping impurities through adsorption.

Globally, textile waste is estimated at 92 million tonnes annually and is projected to increase by 45%, reaching 134 million tonnes by 2030 (BBC News, 2020). This growing volume of post-consumer textile waste poses serious environmental concerns, including greenhouse gas emissions, microfibre pollution, and contamination of land and water ecosystems.

Image credit: iStock.com/Kokkai Ng