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Investigating the residual characteristics of dryer lint for developing resource recovery strategies
Summary
Researchers characterized the material properties of lint collected from commercial laundry dryer filters, finding that the fibers — mostly cellulosic — retain much of their original molecular structure despite mechanical damage from washing and drying. Understanding what lint is made of is a key first step toward recovering value from this waste stream rather than releasing it as microfiber pollution.
The residual structural and morphological characteristics of the exfoliated textile fibers, termed as dry lint, trapped in commercial laundry dryer filters have been assessed for the first time. Any attempt toward resource recovery from lint would require detailed material characterization and properties as a priori. Lint fibers collected from five different commercial laundromat dryer filters were used as characteristic samples for the preliminary investigation. The residual morphological and molecular structural characteristics of lint fibers were evaluated using microscopic imaging, spectroscopy and diffraction methods. Microscopic imaging revealed the extent of fiber fibrillation and agglomeration as a result of textile laundering process. Fibrillation intensity could be realized in significant reduction of water retention value of bulk fibers that was measured as 0.45 g/g of lint. Interestingly, characterization data from Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) studies indicate that the crystalline and molecular structure of fibers were relatively less affected. Further, FTIR spectra and XRD diffractogram of lint fibers resemble that of virgin cellulose I polymorph, thereby signifying the presence of major proportions of cellulosic fibers in dry lint. Residual properties encourages the devise of efficient resource recovery strategies for engineering high-value-added products from lint waste, and thus curtail microfiber pollution.