Enzymatic modification of cotton fibre polysaccharides as an enabler of sustainable laundry detergents.

Cotton is the most common natural fibre used in textile manufacture, used alone or with other fibres to create a wide range of fashion clothing and household textiles. Most of these textiles are cleaned using detergents and domestic or commercial washing machines using processes that require many chemicals and large quantities of water and energy. Enzymes can reduce this environmental footprint by enabling effective detergency at reduced temperatures, mostly by directly attacking substrates present in the soils.

Impact of vented and condenser tumble dryers on waterborne and airborne microfiber pollution.

Laundering of textiles is a significant source of waterborne microfiber pollution, and solutions are now being sought to mitigate this issue including improvements in clothing technology and integration of filtration systems into washing machines. Vented tumble dryers are a potential source of airborne microfiber pollution, as their built-in lint filtration systems have been found to be inefficient with significant quantities of textile microfibers being released to the external environment through their exhaust air ducts. The present study is the first to evaluate the impact of condenser dryers, finding that they are significant contributors to waterborne microfiber pollution from the lint filter (if users clean this with water), the condenser and the condensed water.

Removal of eDNA from fabrics using a novel laundry DNase revealed using high-resolution imaging.

Washed textiles can remain malodorous and dingy due to the recalcitrance of soils. Recent work has found that 'invisible' soils such as microbial extracellular DNA (eDNA) play a key role in the adhesion of extracellular polymeric substances that form matrixes contributing to these undesirable characteristics. Here we report the application of an immunostaining method to illustrate the cleaning mechanism of a nuclease (DNase I) acting upon eDNA.