Abstract
Waste polyester textiles are not recycled due to separation challenges and partial structural degradation during use and recycling. Chemical recycling of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) textiles through depolymerization can provide a feedstock of recycled monomers to make “as-new” polymers. While enzymatic PET recycling is a more selective and more sustainable approach, methods in development, however, have thus far been limited to clean, high-quality PET feedstocks, and require an energy-intensive melt-amorphization step ahead of enzymatic treatment. Here, high-crystallinity PET in mixed PET/cotton textiles could be directly and selectively depolymerized to terephthalic acid (TPA) by using a commercial cutinase from Humicola insolens under moist-solid reaction conditions, affording up to 30±2 % yield of TPA. The process was readily combined with cotton depolymerization through simultaneous or sequential application of the cellulase enzymes CTec2®, providing up to 83±4 % yield of glucose without any negative influence on the TPA yield.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e202201613 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | ChemSusChem |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 27 Sept 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 9 Jan 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2022 Wiley-VCH GmbH.
Keywords
- biocatalysis
- cotton
- mechanoenzymatic hydrolysis
- PET
- textiles
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Environmental Chemistry
- General Chemical Engineering
- General Materials Science
- General Energy