Environmentally friendly oleophobic coating for your clothes

tribonet.org

8 points·tribonet··7 comments

OK, it's basically plastic. I'd like to ask these chemists what happens to it at the end of the life cycle. Does it end up in the oceanic gyres with all the soda bottles and supermarket bags? Does it degrade to genuinely harmless components fairly quickly?

Also during washing/drying usually fibers are set free into the environment

If you had oleophobic and hydrophobic coatings you probably wouldn't need to send it through the wash. At least you wouldn't need to wash it the same way.

There are no materials that magically end up in the oceanic gyres. Things that float and that we throw away will end up in rivers, then the ocean.

Soda bottles and supermarket bags do degrade pretty quickly. The problem is that if they do that while floating on the ocean, they have a bad impact on the environment.

The pacific plastic patch has a half life between one and three years. There are no technical challenge to remove it, just a political one: stop throwing plastic in places that washes them away inside rivers and within a few years the Patch will be gone.

Uh, this looks like shitty science reporting: "That resistance, however, comes at a price. The coating that makes textiles oil resistant is fluorine-based and breaks down into chlorofluorocarbon gas, a greenhouse gas harmful to the environment."

Maybe if you burn it. Fluoro-polymers are pretty stable.

Guess what burns easily? Most textiles. Maybe that's what they were hinting at?

Cool!!!

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