Sustainable textiles
Individual project - Master Thesis at Imperial College London. I aim to create the world's first potato harvest waste viscose fibers.
I am doing my Master Research Thesis in collaboration with a start-up called Fibe. The company aims to tackle the unsustainable model of the fashion industry, the second largest polluting industry in the world, and reduce the vast amounts of water, land, and CO2 produced when creating conventional textiles. Their proposed solution uses potato harvest waste as the raw material, as these plants cannot be composted or fed to livestock and thus create huge waste streams and are currently incinerated.
My goal is to create viscose fibres from potato harvest waste to make biodegradable, lightweight, breathable, comfortable, soft, and inexpensive textiles that substitute synthetic fibers. The process involves 4 stages: 1) alkali cellulose synthesis using 18% NaOH, 2) Xanthation reaction using CS2, 3) Fibre spinning and 4) Characterization. This innovation will affect every step in the clothing supply chain, from sourcing the raw material, to factories, distribution of finished clothes, or end-users.
