A team of engineers and designers have developed a DIY machine that spins textile fibres made of materials like sustainably-sourced gelatin. The group's "biofibres" feel a bit like flax fibre and dissolve in hot water in minutes to an hour.
- The machine developed by the researchers is small enough to fit on a desk and costs just $560 to build. The team hopes the device will help designers around the world experiment with making their own biofibres.
THE RESEARCHERS: The engineers and designers are from the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. The team, led by Eldy Lázaro Vásquez, a doctoral student in the ATLAS Institute, presented its findings in May at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Honolulu.
THE CONTEXT: The study tackled a growing problem around the world: In 2018 alone, people in the United States added more than 11 million tonnes of textiles to landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency—nearly 8% of all municipal solid waste produced that year.
- The study arrives as fashionistas, roboticists and more are embracing a trend known as "smart textiles." The Levi's Trucker Jacket with Jacquard by Google, for example, looks like a denim coat but includes sensors that can connect to a smartphone.
- But such clothing of the future comes with a downside. That jacket isn't recyclable. It's difficult to separate the denim from the copper yarns and the electronics.
THE SOLUTION: To imagine a new way of making clothes, the team started with gelatin. This springy protein is common in the bones and hooves of many animals, including pigs and cows. Every year, meat producers throw away large volumes of gelatin that doesn't meet requirements for cosmetics or food products like Jell-O.
- Lázaro Vásquez bought her own gelatin, which comes as a powder, from a local butcher shop. She and her colleagues decided to turn that waste into wearable treasure.
- The group's machine uses a plastic syringe to heat up and squeeze out droplets of a liquid gelatin mixture. Two sets of rollers in the machine then tug on the gelatin, stretching it out into long, skinny fibres—not unlike a spider spinning a web from silk. In the process, the fibres also pass through liquid baths where the researchers can introduce bio-based dyes or other additives to the material. Adding a little bit of genipin, an extract from fruit, for example, makes the fibres stronger.
- As a proof of concept, the researchers made small sensors out of gelatin fibres and cotton and conductive yarns, similar to the makeup of a jacquard jacket. The team then submerged these patches in warm water. The gelatin dissolved, releasing the yarns for easy recycling and reuse.
- Designers could tweak the chemistry of the fibres to make them a little more resilient. They could also play around with spinning similar fibres from other natural ingredients. Those materials include chitin, a component of crab shells, or agar-agar, which comes from algae.
WHAT THEY SAID:
You could customise fibres with the strength and elasticity you want, the colour you want. With this kind of prototyping machine, anyone can make fibres. You don't need the big machines that are only in university chemistry departments… We're trying to think about the whole lifecycle of our textiles. That begins with where the material is coming from. Can we get it from something that normally goes to waste?
— Eldy Lázaro Vásquez, (Lead Author)
Doctoral student, ATLAS Institute
University of Colorado Boulder
