Circular fashion could get a shot in the arm with sorting of fabric blends in clothing by using an electron beam to segregate different fabric components through electrostatic separation.
- A multi-disciplinary team of students at a EU-funded I.Fast Pproject — a challenge-based innovation event — proposed the use of an electron beam to segregate different fabric components through electrostatic separation for both used and unused clothes.
- The separated components could then be reintroduced into the manufacturing cycle of recycled clothes.
- The jury was convinced by the winning ‘FabRec’ team’s idea of applying particle accelerators to treat textile waste. Currently, only 1% of textile waste is recycled into new clothes.
- Recycling textile polymers is a costly and challenging task, as is the separation and recycling of blended textiles—complex mixtures of different fibres, often cotton or wool with synthetic materials.
I-FAST PROJECT: The EU-funded I.FAST project gathered highly motivated students from all across Europe to imagine how particle accelerators could address novel environmental issues.
- The 2023 edition of its Challenge-Based Innovation (I.FAST-CBI) project was held at the European Scientific Institute (ESI) in Archamps, near Geneva.
- The event brought together 24 students of 14 different nationalities, with as many different backgrounds: physics and engineering, as well as environmental science, communication and sociology.
- They spent ten days attending high-level seminars on accelerators and learning about their environmental applications.
- Multidisciplinary teams were then asked to suggest potential new applications and to present their project to experts in the field, at CERN, on the last day of the challenge.
CERN? Remember Higgs Boson? Well, that was from CERN, an organisation that helps to uncover what the universe is made of and how it works. It does so by providing a unique range of particle accelerator facilities to researchers, to advance the boundaries of human knowledge.
