While I was on sabbatical at NREL, I had the opportunity to learn more about NREL’s many efforts to reduce plastic waste. In this new paper in Nature Sustainability, Minjung Lee, Kat Knauer and the rest of the NREL team developed a method to extract dyes from polyester fabrics to make the fabrics easier to recycle. As an added bonus, the dyes can also be separated and reused. Eli Fastow and I provided structural characterization to further support their hypothesis that their dye extraction method does not perturb the crystalline structure. I’m looking forward to seeing how this method will be applied!
Dye Extraction from Polyester Fabrics — A Major Step Toward Recycling
