Rather than discarding silk yarn, researchers say use it to clean waterways

ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University researchers have developed a sustainable way to clean up waterways: reusing one waste product to remove another.

Led by assistant professor Larissa Shepherd, the team has proposed using discarded silk yarn for the removal of dye and oil from water. Studies on several different forms of silk: fabrics, yarns, and fibers revealed that yarn unraveled from silk fabric, soaked up methylene blue (MB), a common textile dye, from water at a substantially higher rate than other forms of silk they tested.

What’s more, the silk yarn can be cleaned and reused. Shepherd’s group found that the textile can withstand at least 10 cycles, with minimal loss of functionality.

“Structure is really important in my lab, so we start from the nano scale and work up to that finished textile,” Shepherd said. “We were looking for a structure that was optimum for this adsorption, and we initially thought that the silk fabrics coated with particles were going to work best, but we found that just disassembling the fabric itself to the yarn stage actually showed, for the same weight, even faster adsorption.”

Shepherd envisions “pillows” containing the silk yarn unraveled from discarded textiles and remnants from the cut and sew operations of the textiles industry as being an effective means of cleaning up spills and waste materials, including MB dye, which is detrimental to agricultural land and waterways when it is accidentally released from textile plants.

“We realized that we can kill two birds with one stone: We can get rid of waste textiles, which is a big issue in the textile industry in general,” Shepherd said. “And then we found that it’s actually really good at adsorbing, just because of its natural, structural properties.”

For additional information, read this Cornell Chronicle story.

Cornell University has dedicated television and audio studios available for media interviews.

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