Cotton clothes vanish in soil fast, polyester barely budges
Erayman Yüksel Y, Korkmaz Y
Composting
The cotton scraps and old t-shirts you toss in the compost pile will actually disappear into the soil within a season, but that polyester blend will still be sitting there next year, more or less unchanged.
Researchers buried different fabric samples in soil for up to seven months to see what would actually rot away and what wouldn't. Cotton fabric, even when made from recycled fibers, broke down almost entirely within just one to four months. Polyester fabric, on the other hand, showed no meaningful breakdown at all, even after seven months in the ground, and recycling the polyester didn't change that outcome one bit.
Key Findings
100% cotton and cotton/recycled-cotton blend fabrics degraded 93-95% after just 1 month and were completely gone by 4 months.
100% polyester and 100% recycled polyester fabrics showed no measurable degradation after 1, 4, or 7 months of soil burial.
Recycled fibers behaved just like their virgin counterparts: recycled cotton degraded as readily as virgin cotton, and recycled polyester stayed as inert as virgin polyester.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Cotton fabric, whether virgin or recycled, breaks down almost completely in soil within four months, while polyester fabric shows no signs of decomposing even after seven months.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Soil biodegradation of virgin and recycled cotton and PET based fabrics: physicochemical and biological assessment.
With increasing waste generation and environmental concerns in textiles, biodegradability is considered one of the most important waste management strategies. The biodegradability behavior of texti...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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