A newly developed laundry additive with the potential to remove pollutants from the environment could work best on denim materials, according to one of its creators.
The additive, which is known as Catclo and could soon be used in industrial laundry operations, is designed to reduce the presence of polluting nitrogen oxides in the environment, which have been linked with respiratory problems in the past. It does this using titanium nanoparticles, which stick to the surface fibres of fabric that has been washed in the additive. These nanoparticles then react with the oxygen in the air when the dry clothing is worn and light shines on it.
Professor Tony Ryan, a co-creator of the innovative Catclo product, has now said that denim is one of the materials the additive will work best with. Speaking in an interview with The Guardian, he used the town of Sheffield as an example to explain how the additive would potentially work:
“To get Sheffield below the air-quality threshold we need about a quarter of a million people to be catalysed at any one time — about half the population. So if it was only people in Levis then you wouldn’t have enough people….But because there are more pairs of jeans in the UK than there are people, if half the people had washed their jeans in this stuff then we’d be there. It works particularly well with denim.”