Towards a Circular Textile Economy: Enhancing Enzymatic Textile Recycling through Mechanical Pre-processing Methods (KB-45-005-018)

In our previous Wildcard project, we assessed whether oxidase enzymes could decrease the crystallinity of polyester-based textiles to allow for increased hydrolytic activity of polyester-degrading enzymes. We found that these oxidase enzymes had trouble targeting non-natural substrates like polyesters. However, we found that using a cocktail of carbohydrate-active enzymes, we were able to degrade commercial cotton/polyester textile blends. Moreover, we found that using mechanical pre-processing (e.g. ball milling or bead milling) of commercial textiles, significantly improved enzymatic degradation, possibly due to partly decreasing crystallinity.

In this follow-up project, we aim to exploit these findings by investigating these pre-processing methods in more detail, in particular for cotton/polyester textile blends. We are highly interested in optimizing these processing methods to vastly improve our enzymatic recycling technologies. Furthermore, we hope to gain a better understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms of the pre-processing methods. A robust and scalable pre-processing method that can decrease textile fibre crystallinities enough to enhance enzymatic degradation would be highly valuable to the field.