Marjolein Lammerts van Bueren has written up an interview with the principals of Nanonow consulting agency, in a Dec. 15, 2016 article for Amsterdam Fashion Week, where they focus on nanotextiles (Note: Links have been removed),
Strong, sustainable textiles created by combining chemical recycling and nanotechnology – for Vincent Franken and Roel Boekel, their nanotechstiles are there already. With their consulting firm, Nanonow, the two men help companies in a range of industries innovate in the field of nanotechnology. And yes, you guessed it, the fashion industry, too, is finding ways to use the technology to its advantage. Fashionweek.nl sat down with Franken to talk about textiles on a nano scale.
How did you come up with the idea for Nanonow?
“I studied Science, Business & Innovations at the VU in Amsterdam. That’s a beta course that focuses on new technologies and how you can bring them to the market, and I specialised in nanotechnology within that. Because of the many – still untapped – opportunities and applications there are for nanotechnology, I started Nanonow with Roel Boekel after I graduated in 2014. We’re a consulting firm helping companies that still don’t really know how they can make use of nanotechnology, which can be used for a whole lot of things.”
Like the textile industry?
“Exactly. Over the last few years, we’ve done research into several different industries, like the waste and recycling industry. Six months ago we started looking at the textile industry, via Frankenhuis, an international textile recycler. When you throw your clothes in the recycling bin, a portion of them are sold on and a portion are recycled, or downcycled, as I call it. They pull the textiles apart, and those fibres – so the threads – are sold and repurposed into things like insulation. Roel and I thought that was a shame, because you’re deconstructing clothes that have often barely been worn just to make a low-value product out of them.”
So you’ve developed an alternative, Nanotechstiles. Tell us about it!
“We actually wanted to make new clothes from the deconstructed clothes. This is already happening via mechanical recycling, where you produce new clothes by reweaving the old textile fibres. But for me, the Holy Grail we’re looking for – I’m a tech guy after all – is the molecules inside the fibres.”
“First, we don’t want to use the existing thread, but instead we want to pull the thread apart completely then put it back together again. This is called chemical recycling and it’s already happening today. You can remove the cellulose fibres from cotton then put them back together to form viscose or lyocell. The downside of that is that the process is pretty expensive and the quality isn’t always that good.”
“Then you also have nanotechnologies, an area that’s developing rapidly and is already being used to strengthen textiles, which makes them last longer. But there are more options for making textiles no-iron, antibacterial – so that it doesn’t start to smell as quickly – or stain resistant. You can also integrate energy-saving electronics into them, or make them water resistant, as you saw last year on Valerio Zeno and Dennis Storm’s BNN TV programme, Proefkonijnen.”
“When you use nanotechnology to make materials smaller, you transform them, as it were, giving them completely different characteristics. So the fact that you can transform materials means that you can also do this with the threads themselves. We believe that when you combine chemical recycling with nanotechnology, what you get is the perfect thread. We call them nanotechstiles, and in the end, they lead to higher quality clothes that are sustainable, as well.”
“The fact that you can transform materials means that you can also do this with the threads themselves”
How far along are you in the research for nanotechstiles?
“We won the TKI Dinalog Take Off in the logistics sector last year with our nanotechstiles idea. That’s a prize for young talent with innovative ideas for economics and logistics. Since then, we’ve been trying to make the concept more concrete. Which recycling methods can we combine with which nanotechnologies? We’re already pretty far along in that research process, but there hasn’t been any clothing produced from it as yet. We’re focusing on cotton because it makes up the largest proportion of waste. At the moment, we’re in talks with the Institut für Textiltechnik at the University of Aken about how we can produce clothes from our nanotechstiles.
Have you also discovered some pitfalls as part of your research?
“The frustrating thing about nanotechnology is that the more you know about it, the less you can do with it. A lot of options are eliminated during the research process. I’ll give you an example. You want to make clothes that don’t smell as quickly? Well, on paper we know that silver kills 99.9% of bacteria, though we haven’t tested it. So then that leaves you with 0.1%, and that percentage can grow exponentially by using the nutrients from other bacteria. So the material in the clothing itself is safe, but what if a few particles come loose in the wash and get into the drinking water? What happens then? A lot of potential options are eliminated as you go through a process like that because they can be dangerous.”
What are the downsides and how can you guarantee that a design is safe?
“A tremendous amount of nanotechnologies are still in the research phase, so they’re too expensive to develop. We’d like to be using some of them now, but it turns out that there are still too many uncertainties to realistically put them into use. It’s essential to apply the principles of safety by design, only using nanotechnologies where the safety concerns have been well thought out. That’s something we’ve been in touch with the Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieu (Royal Institute for Public Health and the Environment, RIVM) about. We take safety and the environment into account at every step in the production process for nanotechstiles.”
What the biggest challenge to your concept?
“We already know how certain nanotechnologies respond to cotton, but the biggest challenge is to figure out how they respond to recycled fabrics. You have to remember that nanotechnology isn’t just one thing. You can apply it to any material, which gives you thousands of possibilities. The question is, which one do you think is the most important? For example, you can add carbon nanotubes to make a fabric stronger, but then you’d be paying thousands of euros for a single shirt, and no one wants that.”
What’s the next step?
“Right now, we’re trying to get a sort of crowdfunding campaign started amongst businesses. We’re hoping to build relationships with companies like IKEA, who want to use our sustainable and stain-resistant textiles for things like their employee uniforms. So in addition to the subsidies, they’re helping to fund the research in that way. Based on that, we’ll eventually choose a nanotechnology that we can work up into an actual textile.”
I encourage you to read the original article with its embedded images, additional information, and links to more information.
One last comment, nanotechnology-enabled textiles are usually brand new materials so this is the first time I’ve seen a nanotechnology-based approach to recycling textiles. Bravo!
