Towards safe up- and re-cycling of textile waste

Important results from the project

The purpose of the project was to open new avenues in assuring the safety of textile re- and up-cycling by developing new methods for detecting potentially harmful chemical from the garment. We have developed two methods a so-called textile spray and matrix-free laser-desorption for analysis of the contaminants from the textile. Neither of these methods needs time-consuming sample preparation and may allow textile monitoring in the sorting facilities.

Expected long term effects

We have built/modified the inlets for the mass spectrometry to enable textile spray and matrix-free laser desorption mass spectrometry and analysed different textile materials. The results indicate that industrial, dyes, herbicides, compounds originating from wearing it, as well as drugs, can be detected with such methods.

Approach and implementation

The main design aspect of this project is the speed of the analysis as sorting facilities acquire thousands of items per day. The new concept we have implemented has sped up the analysis from a few hours per item to less than a minute and the limiting factor currently is the manually conducted cutting/pulling a thread of the textile. A further design of the devices requires large scale automatization of this step and data processing for the implementation in the textile sorting facilities.