Wearable catalytic surface
Sitting in his office, wearing his own pair of catalytic jeans, Professor Tony Ryan OBE scientist at the University of Sheffield, explains how his collaboration with clothes designer and artist Professor Helen Storey MBE at the London College of Fashion, began several years ago. She contacted him after he appeared on a radio science show. Their first work together, called Wonderland, was based on exploring sustainability in fashion. Their latest project is to show us how our clothes can be a catalytic surface to purify the air around us as we go about our daily business.

Mobile air purifier
The idea for Catalytic Clothing came to Ryan in a meeting at the London College of Fashion. As he idly worked out the surface area of someone’s clothes, he realised that it was the same as the surface area per unit mass in a catalytic converter of a car. Thus the human perambulating catalytic system was born. The catalyst cleans up nitric oxide, which in big cities is the biggest cause of air pollution and respiratory diseases.

The Catalytic Clothing project launched with an air purifying dress from Helen’s design collection which they retro-fitted with a spray catalyst. Their Field of Jeans concept is based on the fact that there are more pairs of jeans in the world than there are people and it turns out, the catalyst works really well on jeans. As Ryan says, ‘like a crop, the Field of Jeans does the environmental clean up.’

Laundry solution
The project is sponsored by sustainable cleaning products manufacturer, Ecover. The plan is to bring a commercially viable clothes detergent to the supermarkets. Much like a 2 in 1 shampoo conditioner, the process deposits the catalyst agent in the cloth while the used detergent is rinsed away. Ryan says one of the challenges they faced was: ‘how do you make the right formulation so all the particles go on the cloth and not down the drain?’

Always thinking about a sustainable future, Professor Ryan is on the alert for an affordable solution to purifying water.  His concern is that more children die of dysentery than malnutrition. He says ‘knowing that the problem is there, our experience tells us that the flash of inspiration will come.’