UNITED KINGDOM: A scientist and fashion designer have teamed up to produce a pollution-busting laundry detergent containing nanoparticles that literally clean the air around them

Record ID: 216978

  • Title: UNITED KINGDOM: A scientist and fashion designer have teamed up to produce a pollution-busting laundry detergent containing nanoparticles that literally clean the air around them
  • Date: 25th November 2012
  • Summary: DRYERS, PAN TO CLIENTS IN LAUNDERETTE
  • Embargoed: 10th December 2012 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: United Kingdom
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Topics: Environment,Science / Technology
  • Reuters ID: LVAC9M8X5I4JS357SZ1Y1IBSDZ32
  • Story Text: A physical chemist has joined forces with an award-winning fashion designer to create a laundry additive that neutralises nitrogen oxide. The British pair believe their invention could radically improve air quality. Yet, unlike most inventors, Tony Ryan and Helen Storey are refusing to patent their technology and potentially gain huge financial rewards, instead insisting the technology should be free to anyone who shares theirs their passion for reducing air emissions.
    Ryan is professor of physical chemistry at Sheffield University, and has spent much of his career studying polymers and soft nanotechnology. Together with the fashion designer Helen Storey, Professor of Fashion Science at the London College of Fashion, he is developing a laundry additive called Catclo. The additive sticks to the surface fibres of clothes and reacts with airborne nitrogen oxides to neutralise them.
    Catclo is in the final stage of development and Ryan and Storey hope that it will be added to as many washing detergents as possible.
    Ryan says he came up with the idea while feeling restless at an academic meeting. "I sat down and calculated the surface area of my suit in this really boring meeting I had to go to and when I came back I had the answer of how we could use low-grade energy. We'd turn people into catalyst supports, so that they were covered in catalyst and could wander around using light and the surface of their clothes to clean up," said Ryan.
    He teamed up with Storey, who developed an interest in the science of clothing while working on a project with her sister Kate, a biologist at the University of Dundee. The pair regard themselves as natural partners, Ryan providing the chemistry expertise and Storey the fashion experience and ability to persuade the public of the product's value.
    Catclo contains nanoparticles of titanium a thousand times thinner than a human hair. Titanium oxide is normally found in glass, sun cream and paving stones. When clothes are washed with Catclo the particles are deposited on to the fibres of the fabric. The nanoparticles stay within the clothes' fabric forever, so clothes only have to be washed with the additive once and wearers can return to using their normal liquid detergent afterwards. When the catalysed clothes are worn, light shines on the titanium particles and excites the electrons on the particle surface. The excited electrons react with oxygen above the surface of the particle, splitting it into lone oxygen atoms which suck NOx - nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide - out of the atmosphere. The by-product - harmless, water-soluble nitrates - wash away when the trousers are laundered.
    The anti-pollutant properties work best when the clothes are worn, as regular movement need light and good airflow to catalyse the harmful substances into the benign by-product.
    Ryan says the biggest task the pair faced while starting their research was public attitudes. He said: "The regular questions are: 'am I absorbing dirt, am I walking around getting dirtier?' and we know from market research that customers don't want to wear self-cleaning clothes because they want to wash them, they want to feel clean. And the answer is no, the pollution's just passing you by, but when it comes into contact with you you neutralise it."
    Ryan added: "It doesn't absorb it, okay, so the NOx comes onto the particles, the nanoparticles, gets turned into something else, and goes away. So you're not a dirt magnet. Your surface is just acting as a support for this catalyst that uses sunlight and oxygen to turn a pollutant into something that's not toxic."
    They decided to use the chemical compounds on clothes rather than buildings because of the potentially greater surface area covered by millions of people walking through the streets. While the surface of buildings is generally flat, that contained in the sum of each individual fibre in an item of clothing is larger than the area of the fabric itself.
    Ryan says key to making the technology is persuading up to half the population to wear an item of catalysed clothes at any one time. He says that one pair of jeans worn in strong sunlight will take around five grams of NOx per day from the atmosphere.
    Storey regularly wears jeans treated with the detergent additive, as well as various dresses. Posing alongside a catalysed red viscose and silk dress, Storey said any degradation to clothing quality caused by the additive are below microscopic level.

    "This piece has now been sprayed for about a year and I've been wearing these jeans for about two years and so far there's been no detrimental effect to the process, either of the handle of it or the wear or the colour of it. But a lot of those things are a very natural process of taking it from something like this, which you could call almost installation art to a product that's fit for market," she said.
    The iconic designer, whose celebrity clients have included Cher, Madonna and Liz Hurley, says the pair decided early in their collaboration to work with a laundry additive rather than on producing pre-catalysed clothes.

    "We've deliberately tried to piggyback human nature as it happens anyway. A lot of these problems are really hard to solve if you're asking people to change their behaviour as well, so it's deliberate that we've gone for a laundry process. We want people to just be able to use it in the way they use any other product. We don't want them buying special clothes. We don't want to add to the problem, we're trying to solve one of them," she said.
    Ryan believes the process of getting their additive from the laboratory onto the supermarket shelves could take as little as a year. Safety tests are being run on the product but there is no evidence it affects human skin or water supplies. Cleaning products company Ecover is currently testing the additive with a view to adding it to their laundry detergents.
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