Less than 1 percent of our clothing actually gets recycled The rest ends up in a landfill or it gets incinerated contributing to climate pollution but here at the University of Delaware in Newark researchers think they’ve found a solution I’m here with Erha Andini She’s a PhD student here at the University of Delaware and she’s the brains behind this new solution Erha, tell us why it’s so hard to recycle clothing right now Recycling clothes is very challenging because modern garments consist of different types of fibers all interlaced together and that makes separating them into their pure components very challenging So like for instance this shirt I have right now It’s got lots of components.

I’m not sure what they are But can we recycle this today through your process?

We can try I wanted to solve this problem mainly after learning that less than one percent of clothes are recycled back to clothes And I thought that’s very interesting because when you go to stores You’ll see on the tags they say made from recycled polyester but in reality, those came from plastic bottles So I’m watching my shirt getting broken down into its component parts which then will allow us to then reuse those fibers theoretically in new clothing, so that cuts our carbon emissions Yes Taking this process out of the lab and into the real world could mean keeping a lot of climate polluting clothes out of the waste stream