Social isolation can produce psychological problems such as depression or anxiety in some people as humans are social beings. Right now it's impossible to provide real face to face experience with technology, even with video chats and that's why people need to be with each other. To satisfy that need, people started breaking the quarantine, using masks, and visiting between them. However, the kind of masks they use are not environmentally friendly which is why our team decided to provide a solution with our orange made mask. We think that human contact is needed to avoid these problems but if we are going to protect ourselves using masks, it's time to consider protecting the environment at the same time.

What are they made of? What properties do they guarantee?

Citric extracts to make the textile fibres. Their properties are:

● Flexibility, which eases their procedure and enables their reuse.

● Biodegradable, which does not pollute due to taking less time to degrade than plastics (6 months).

How do we obtain orange peels?

We'll encourage people to provide their orange peels in certain collection points in order to reduce material obtention costs. An amount of 12,5 orange peels is needed to produce a 60g (grams) mask.

What makes them better than regular masks?

They are lighter, more comfortable and more economical. In case they are thrown away, they would be composted because of the biodegradable materials. Moreover, they lack toxic components, avoiding secondary effects (such as allergies).

How are these masks produced?

The first step in manufacturing this fabric is to obtain citrus cellulose from fruits, by dissolving lignin and the other non-cellulose portions. This can be done both mechanically and chemically. The first consists of crushing the raw material under certain conditions of temperature and pressure, then washing the fibers and bleaching the obtained paste; while the second, the most widely used, consists of chemical cooking for the elimination of non-cellulosic components with the help of chemical agents, inside reactors that work at high pressures and temperatures.

One of the most widely used chemical processes is Soda, in which the raw material is first conditioned by removing essential oils, drying, crushing and screening. Then the hydroxyl, from natural hydrolytic reactions, manages to extract the non-cellulosic components from the shell, and the cellulose part is dried.

Then follows the impregnation stage, to increase the contact between the white liquor and the shells for further dissolution of the lignin. Basically, the raw material is left in an alkaline medium for 24 hours at room temperature and pressure

During digestion, the lignin-cellulose matrix is separated with the use of sodium hydroxide in a ratio of 30% on a dry basis maintaining a ratio of 1:7 raw material and constant bleaching liquor also in 1:7.  It allows for obtaining the optimal conditions of the process.

Once the digestion is finished, we proceed to the filtration, in which the liquor is separated exhausts the pulp. The filter medium is a perforated plate installed in the tank.

The washing is done to neutralize the action of the digestion liquor, thus preventing the degradation of the fibre.

Bleaching is also done, to destroy the colouring matter that could not be separated in the digestion. This is done thanks to the peroxide.

This bleaching is done by adding sodium hydroxide to the water until a pH of 10.5 is achieved. It is then heated to 80°C and hydrogen peroxide is added, at which point the reaction begins.

The fibre is usually obtained by the method called Lyocell, which is composed of three stages: the dissolution of the cellulose, spinning and subsequent treatment of the fibres and the recovery of the solvent and its recycling. The cellulose is dissolved when the solvent is hot, producing a very clear and viscous solution that is filtered and spun in a coagulation bath with a solution diluted in the solvent. The coagulation bath removes amine oxide from the fibres, which are then washed and dried; the removed solvent is regenerated for reuse

The process for obtaining cellulose in solution with the solvent is a purely physical system, unlike the others in which chemicals are used.

After this process we finally obtained the fabric needed to make our masks like a normal one.

Process diagram.