MIT students win with ‘temporary tattoos’ for T-shirts
A student team has won the annual materials science competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a design for a biodegradable material than can be easily added and removed from shirts.
The aim is to tackle excessive textiles waste, suggesting bands or events t-shirts could be created with designs that could be easily washed off.
The winning team, Me-Shirts (pictured), got their inspiration from the competition itself, which ordinarily designs a different T-shirt each year.
PhD candidate Isabella Caruso said: “The main markets we are trying to address are for one-time T-shirts and custom T-shirts.
“Our proposed solution is a temporary shirt tattoo made from biodegradable, nontoxic materials. We wanted designs that are fully removable through washing, so that you can wear your T-shirt for your one-time event and then get a nice white T-shirt back afterwards.”
The team’s design process mixes potato starch, glycerin and water. The design can be imprinted on the shirt temporarily through ironing.
The Me-Shirt team, which earned $10,000 with the win, plans to continue exploring material combinations to make the design more flexible and easier for people to apply at home. Future iterations could allow users to decide if they want the design to stay on the shirt during washes based on the settings of the washing machine.
The second-place $6,000 prize went to Alkalyne, which is creating a carbon-neutral polymer. The company is developing approaches for using electricity and inorganic carbon to generate a high-energy hydrocarbon precursor.
The third prize went to Microbeco, which is exploring the use of microbial fuel cells for continuous water quality monitoring. Microbes have been proposed as a way to detect and measure contaminants in water for decades, but the team believes the varying responses of microbes to different contaminants has limited the effectiveness of the approach.
