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Silk Nonwoven: Recycling and Upcycling of Waste Silk into Bio-based Materials with High Value-Added Properties

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Abstract

With the increasing awareness of human environmental protection, the development of biodegradable bio-based materials has received more attention. As the off-cuts of silk, a natural protein fiber, waste silk still retains excellent properties such as biodegradability and biocompatibility, recycling and utilization of waste silk is currently very limited. To find a possible method to recycle low-cost waste silk and process it into high-value-added products, in this work, the waste silk from the silk spinning process was prepared into silk nonwoven (SN) with excellent air permeability, softness, water–oil amphiphilicity, biodegradability, and ultraviolet resistance by the wet laid process. The results showed that the uniform SN could be prepared when the alkali concentration was higher than 0.6%. The permeability of SN is higher than 80 mm/s, and the bending stiffness is lower than 0.085gf·cm2/cm. Notably, SN possesses entanglement at both fiber and fibril levels, enabling it to achieve a base strength of 0.58 MPa without additional reinforcement. The water contact angle and oil contact angle of SN were below 40° and 50°, respectively. The ultraviolet protection of SN-0.6 was classified as very good, with a degradation rate of 4.31% of SN-0.6 after 30 days of burial. The present research shows that silk nonwoven is a potential bio-based material with promising applications in the field of packaging and cleaning.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would especially like to thank the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality (20015800200), the National Key R&D Program of China (2022YFC3006100), and the University-Industry Collaborative Education Program (220606429135509).

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Author notes

  1. Hongchang Wang and Liyao Cao contributed equally to this paper.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Textiles, Donghua University, Shanghai, 201620, China

    Hongchang Wang, Liyao Cao, Yuling Li, Run Wen & Guangbiao Xu

  2. Key Laboratory of Textile Science and Technology Ministry of Education, Donghua University, Shanghai, 201620, China

    Yuling Li & Guangbiao Xu

Authors
  1. Hongchang Wang
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  2. Liyao Cao
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  3. Yuling Li
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  4. Run Wen
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Contributions

HW was involved in the conceptualization, methodology, validation, investigation, and writing—original draft. LC contributed to the data curation, validation, and formal analysis. YL contributed to writing—review and editing. GX & RW assisted in the writing—review and editing and funding acquisition. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Run Wen or Guangbiao Xu.

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Wang, H., Cao, L., Li, Y. et al. Silk Nonwoven: Recycling and Upcycling of Waste Silk into Bio-based Materials with High Value-Added Properties. Fibers Polym 24, 3489–3500 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12221-023-00258-w

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