MIT engineers design recyclable elastic yarn

Melt it, spin it, use it again. This new recyclable yarn is as strong and stretchy as spandex-based yarns.

“Eighty percent of textiles on the U.S. market currently contain some amount of spandex, which makes them nonrecyclable,” says Svetlana Boriskina, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “There’s no widely adopted technology now that recycles textiles into textiles. With our new yarn, we hope to change that.”

Boriskina and her colleagues have published the details of the new yarn in a study published in the journal ACS Materials Letters. MIT co-authors include first author SeongHyeon Kim, Duo Xu, Volodymyr Korolovych, Domingo Flores-Hernandez, Kaniz Moriam, and Daniel Braconnier.

Read more about the new recyclable yarn research by Svetlana Boriskina’s lab supported in part by the MIT Portugal Program in the MIT News.