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Approximately 92 million tons of textile waste is generated globally per year, . CU researchers envision a different future for fashion.

A team led by Eldy Lázaro Vásquez (PhDCTD’25), a doctoral student in the ATLAS Institute, is busy developing methods to make recyclable clothes from gelatin, the common foodstuff in products like Jell-O and marshmallows.

The team that spins textile fibers made from gelatin. These “biofibers” feel a bit like flax fiber and dissolve in hot water within a few minutes to an hour.

“When you don’t want these textiles anymore, you can dissolve them and recycle the gelatin to make more fibers,” said Michael Rivera, a co-author of the research and assistant professor in the ATLAS Institute and Department of Computer Science.

The machine, which is small enough to fit on a desk and , heats up the gelatin and uses a plastic syringe to squeeze out droplets of the mixture. Two sets of rollers in the machine then tug on the gelatin, stretching it out into long, skinny fibers — not unlike a spider spinning a web from silk.

“With this kind of prototyping machine, anyone can make fibers,” Lázaro Vásquez said. “You don’t need the big machines that are only in university chemistry departments.”

She added that across the U.S., meat producers often discard gelatin that doesn’t meet quality control standards. Lázaro Vásquez bought her own gelatin, which comes as a powder, from a local butcher shop.

Lázaro Vásquez envisions that designers could tweak the chemistry of the fibers to make them a little more resilient — you wouldn’t want your jacket to disappear in the rain. They could also experiment with spinning similar fibers from other abundant natural materials like chitin, a component of crab shells, or agar-agar, which comes from algae.

“We’re trying to think about the whole lifecycle of our textiles,” said Lázaro Vásquez. “That begins with where the material is coming from. Can we get it from something that normally goes to waste?”

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Photo courtesy Utility Research Lab