A new laundry additive turns ordinary garments into wearable air-scrubbers that pull nitrogen oxides from the atmosphere.
By Clay Dillow Posted 09.27.2012 at 12:02 pm 8 Comments

Field of Jeans CatClo works particularly well on denim. DED Associates

Your washing machine and dryer are both energy intensive machines, but soon your rinse cycle could start giving something back. A liquid laundry additive called “CatClo” (for “catalytic clothing”) developed by researchers at the University of Sheffield and London College of Fashion in the UK could imbue clothing with titanium dioxice nanoparticles that scrub nitrogen oxides from the air and oxidize them in the fabric. On the next wash, these nitrogen oxides are simply washed away.

Via a press release from the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council:

The nitrogen oxides treated in this way are completely odourless and colourless and pose no pollution hazard as they are removed harmlessly when the item of clothing is next washed, if they haven’t already been dissipated harmlessly in sweat. The additive itself is also completely harmless and the nanoparticles are unnoticeable from the wearer’s point of view.

The researchers say one person wearing clothes treated with CatClo--and it’s worth noting clothes only need to be washed in the additive once, not with every wash--can remove 5 grams of nitrogen oxides from the air per day, which they equate to roughly the output of the average family vehicle. Not a bad haul for simply getting dressed in the morning.

Radiohead-scored, high-production-value promotional video below.

(Fe) Catalytic Clothing from Protein® TV on Vimeo.

[EPSRC]

8 Comments

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CodeZero
09/27/12 at 12:12 pm

If every person in the US alone used this product, that would equate to 3,466,400 lbs of Nitrogen *PER DAY*
My question would then be, what would dumping THAT MUCH nitrogen back into the water supply do?

Playing Devil's Advocate since 1978

"The only constant in the universe is change"
-Heraclitus of Ephesus 535 BC - 475 BC

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Oakspar77777
09/27/12 at 12:16 pm

About a millionth of what fertlizer run off already does.

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verymery
09/27/12 at 3:08 pm

They say the chemicals used in the clothing are safe but I wonder how safe it is to have these air-born chemicals laying on our skin all day. If they are washed away in the laundry they are still viable while on the clothing. Not so sure about this. I would rather have them create wind machines or some other non-human movable object that are coated in material to scrub the stuff.

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Robot
09/27/12 at 5:56 pm

First, while the article refers to nitrogen oxides, is this the same thing as Nitric Oxide, of which the human body makes good internal use of?

And if this is the same thing, then could nitric oxide be drawn, sucked from the human body via our skin touching these blue jeans and cause health issues? I'm just curious?

And maybe nitric oxide and nitrogen oxides are not the same, but still my question stands, could these jeans pulled good nutrients from a healthy body and cause health issues?

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ford2go
09/28/12 at 2:30 am

Robot
- I looked this up, and nitrogen oxides are undesireable items resulting mainly from combusion -- such as in our friend the auto engine.

Since there are several types, they are generally referred to as NOx when emission controls are discussed.

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Tashinamu8
09/28/12 at 5:34 pm

I love the idea and hope that in the solution created that there is a cradle-to cradle approach that is sustainable. Much like others here in the forum, I have wondered about having NOX sitting next to your skin. They assure us that it is harmless. My next question is:

When NOX is shed from the clothing in the next rinse cycle and the water-carrying NOX is placed into the watershed via leaching, does the concentration of it build up in the groundwater due to the sheer numbers of people now depositing NOX into the leach fields? Just sayin...........

In dryer climates it would take sometime to leach to the groundwater level due to lack of water providing that process, so potentially trees and plants would uptake it through their roots that are not as deep as the ground water level during rainy times when soil saturation rates are higher. This may be potentially adverse to plant life. Will we see a decline in the landscape? In areas of more plentiful rain, the NOX would be leached into the ground water itself or would it chemically change and bind to soil and possibly even provide soil enhancements?

Anybody have any sense of the chemical reaction with soil and leach water for different enviromental conditions and soil types? Thanks.

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quasi44
10/03/12 at 6:39 pm

Won't the presence of nitrates and loose configuration nitrogen oxide affect the bacteria as well as the compounds in our sweat? Decrease aging time in our surface cells with so-called free radical oxidizers? Especially right where clothes rub, like in our critical cellular response zones of neck, armpits, and between the legs?

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Mr. Obvious
10/28/12 at 9:47 pm

If any one has a problem they can wear underwear



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