Marketplace®

Daily business news and economic stories

Self-cleaning clothes are here. Cries of “Victory!” come from the World Mud Pie Consortium

The glass is only 29% filthy!

If you leave your new, chemically-enhanced, cotton t-shirt out to dry in the sun, now you won’t need soap and water to get it clean. Chinese engineers combined titanium dioxide and nitrogen to help self-wash your cotton clothes. Sound like a bomb? No, it’s your future clothes!.

They say stains and odors disappear after being exposed to sunlight. Treated clothes were tested by dousing them with orange dye. After two hours in the sun, engineers claim that 71% of the stain had been removed. And it’s not just a one-time deal. Repeated sun “washings” yielded the same response.

So what have we learned here? Mostly that, in the future, we’ll all be wearing slightly dirty cotton clothes that may or may not be made out of bomb-making materials.

 

Related Topics

Collections:

Latest Episodes

View All Shows
  • Marketplace
    11 hours ago
    25:19
  • Make Me Smart
    16 hours ago
    19:00
  • Marketplace Morning Report
    19 hours ago
    6:55
  • Marketplace Tech
    a day ago
    8:33
  • This Is Uncomfortable
    3 days ago
    56:05
  • Million Bazillion
    24 days ago
    32:45