92 million tons of textiles are discarded globally each year. That’s a huge problem. But UMD Associate Professor Abbie Clarke-Sather, PhD, and her team have created a new way to make textiles more recyclable.
Over the past six years, Clarke-Sather has been developing a new recycling machine, unlike anything else in use today. It’s something she and graduate student Paulo Alves call the Fiber Shredder, patent pending. The device shreds existing textiles back down to fibers in 90 seconds. Unlike similar machines already on the market that cut fibers, the Fiber Shredder pulls them apart, keeping them longer and therefore easier to re-spin back into yarns and other materials.
Now that she and her team have a working prototype, Clarke-Sather hopes to scale it up for commercial use. Her goal? See the machine in every Goodwill and thrift store across the country, even in municipalities’ recycling programs and sustainability conscious clothing brands that want to better handle their own waste. By helping to close the loop on a circular economy, she sees the potential for her research to make a real difference in that 92 million ton problem.
