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Leeds inventor's washing machine 'magic'
A Leeds invention could change the way we do our laundry forever... and it's all thanks to some magic beads.
Grant Woodward reports...
Imagine using just a cup of water and a sprinkling of powder to do your washing.
Not only would you be saving your pockets, you'd be doing your bit for the planet too.
It may sound like a pipedream, but a washing machine that uses 90 per cent less water could be available by the end of next year – and it's all thanks to a chance discovery made right here in Leeds.
The device – developed by Leeds-based Xeros Ltd – harnesses over 30 years of research to replace water with tiny plastic beads that suck up stains.
The idea came from Stephen Burkinshaw, a polymer chemist at Leeds University who spent three decades working out how to improve the dyeing of plastics used in fabrics.
A few years ago he realised the stains on clothes acted in a similar way to dyes, and wondered if he could reverse the process and use plastics to draw away the stains.
After experimenting with a range of plastics, he found nylon worked best due to its unique ability to become highly absorbent in humid conditions.
The beads flood the machine's drum once the clothes are wet and the humidity is at the right level.
When humidity hits 100 per cent, the molecular structure of the plastic becomes amorphous, so the stains soak into the centre of the beads.
Then, once the washing cycle is complete, the beads drain away in the
same way as water in a conventional washing machine.
"In simple terms, it's going to save you a lot of money to do your laundry," said Bill Westwater, chief executive of Xeros.
"There are three expensive bits to washing clothes. There's the water and we can save up to 90 per cent on water, but we can save on electricity as well because we've got good cleaning results at lower temperatures.
"The other advantage is that you don't need to use as much detergent in our system to get good cleaning results, so you can save in that cost area as well."
According to the Energy Saving Trust, just under one-third of household energy is used to heat water, while laundry washing accounts for 15 per cent of all household water consumption.
It means that if everyone in the UK converted from normal washing to the Xeros system, the carbon emissions saved would be the equivalent of taking 1.4 million cars off the roads.
"What will ultimately drive this business is the increasing
environmental concerns people have," said Westwater.
"I'm not here to denigrate the big detergent companies or anything like that, but the fact of the matter is that we do use a lot of water and also produce a lot of effluent when we wash clothes.
"With a Xeros system it's not just about saving input water, it's about reducing your carbon footprint.
"You'll also reduce the amount of effluent both in terms of volume because you're using less water and also in terms of content because you're using less detergent."
The invention – named second on its list of best discoveries of 2010 by the prestigious Time magazine – works much like a normal washer.
Clothes are put into the machine and a cartridge in the back then adds plastic beads to the wash.
These plastic beads are about half a centimetre in size and around 44lb (20 kilos) of them go into each load.
A cup of water, which includes detergent, is added. The water dissolves the dirt which is then absorbed by the beads.
At the end, a grill opens at the bottom of the drum to remove the beads, which can be used up to a hundred times before being recycled.
Xeros says the machine has been tested successfully on a range of fabrics stained with everything from mud, red wine and curry stains to ink from ballpoint pens.
Its initial market will be the commercial laundry industry and UK businesses will be trialling the machine from next spring. After that, it's hoped a version will be produced for domestic use, though it's too early to say how much it would cost.
"We're still a development company but we're now learning to walk rather than being a cash-strapped spin-out from Leeds University, which is really what we've been up to now," said Westwater.
"Our first machine is designed to wash about 20kg of clothes which isn't an enormous machine, some of these commercial laundry washing machines can wash up to 400 kg so we're not at that scale, but they're the sort of size of machine that's used in shirt laundering services, that sort of thing.
"As for domestic, we're a little sketchy on that date because commercial laundry is where we're going to get our first revenues.
"We're very much heads down concentrating on that rather than speculating on the domestic launch time, but it's definitely something we hope to do in the future."
One thing the company needs to perfect before their machines find a place in our homes is how to get rid of all the plastic beads once a washing cycle is complete.
One idea is to use some kind of vacuum wand to suck the beads off the clothes.
"With our current prototypes we can get about 99.95 per cent of beads out of the clothes, which means there are two or three left on each garment.
"In commercial laundry it's not a problem because there's already a lot of manual labour involved in the process.
"But part of the reason we're taking our time on domestic development is that we know we can improve that bead separation."
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Friday 25 May 2012
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