The clothes we’re wearing are creating an environmental crisis. They’re hard to recycle, slow to disintegrate, and often just end up in landfills where they pollute for years and years. But a team of researchers may have an innovative solution. They’ve developed a DIY machine that creates fabrics from a special kind of gelatin. When you’re done with the clothing, you can just disintegrate it back into gelatin and restart the process.

The average US consumer throws away 37 kilograms of clothes every year. Some of those clothes are natural fibers that can disintegrate relatively quickly. Many of them, however, contain synthetic fibers that take decades, centuries, or even more to disintegrate. To make matters even worse, the fashion industry is responsible for 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Researchers at the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder wanted to address this problem. They’ve developed a machine that spins textile fibers from a sustainably sourced gelatin. This biofiber resembles flax fiber and can be used for a variety of different types of clothing.

The key advantage is that the fibers are then extremely easy to disintegrate sustainably. All you have to do is dissolve them in hot water, and it only takes a few minutes.

“When you don’t want these textiles anymore, you can dissolve them and recycle the gelatin to make more fibers,” said Michael Rivera, a co-author of the new research and assistant professor in the ATLAS Institute and Department of Computer Science.

A cheap technology

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. They explained that the machine costs just $560 to build, which makes it accessible for all sorts of businesses — or even for some home consumers. The researchers have also made the machine open source, with all the instructions published for anyone to make their own version of it.

The resulting clothes can be customized with ease.

“You could customize fibers with the strength and elasticity you want, the color you want,” she said. “With this kind of prototyping machine, anyone can make fibers. You don’t need the big machines that are only in university chemistry departments.”

As a proof of concept, the team created several types of fibers and then dissolved them in warm water, showing that the process can be recreated as many times as desired.

“We’re trying to think about the whole lifecycle of our textiles,” Lázaro Vásquez said. “That begins with where the material is coming from. Can we get it from something that normally goes to waste?”

Integrating it into smart textiles

This isn’t the first innovative approach to create sustainable fibers — but fixing the fashion industry is not easy. With fast fashion creating so many cheap clothes, it’s hard to dislodge existing practices with new ones. In fact, fast fashion is one of the main reasons why clothing has become such a big environmental problem.

For this particular application, researchers mostly have their eyes set on the smart textile industry.

Smart textiles are advanced fabrics embedded with digital components, sensors, and electronics to provide added functions beyond traditional clothing. These textiles can monitor and respond to environmental stimuli, such as temperature, light, and pressure, making them highly versatile for various applications.

The smart textile industry, a rapidly growing sector, has applications in healthcare, sports, military, and fashion. Products include garments that track vital signs, adaptive materials that regulate body temperature, and fabrics that enhance athletic performance, illustrating the transformative potential of integrating technology with textiles.

But smart textiles are notoriously unsustainable and un-recyclable — this is where the new fibers can make a difference.

You could integrate these sustainably sourced gelatin-based fibers into smart textiles, creating a new generation of eco-friendly smart clothing. By doing so, you would not only reduce the environmental footprint of the fashion industry but also offer a sustainable solution for the tech-infused clothing sector. This approach could revolutionize the way we think about both fashion and technology, fostering a circular economy where materials are continuously reused rather than discarded.

Future Fashion

The implications of such technology extend far beyond individual consumers. Large-scale adoption by clothing manufacturers and smart textile developers could lead to a significant reduction in waste and greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, the open-source nature of the machine developed democratizes access to this innovative solution, encouraging widespread use and further innovation.

Ultimately, fixing our fashion industry won’t be done in one go. Integrating these biodegradable fibers into smart textiles represents a promising step towards a more sustainable future, but we need sustained action on multiple fronts.

The study “Desktop Biofibers Spinning: An Open-Source Machine for Exploring Biobased Fibers and Their Application Towards Sustainable Smart Textile Design” was published in Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2024). DOI: 10.1145/3613904.3642387.