But if we ever hope to make our clothing sustainable, more fundamental changes to the clothing industry will need to be made. Fabrics, fibres and garments will need to be designed in ways that make them easier to recover and recycle. Some are even looking at turning other types of waste — such as off milk — into clothing. When milk turns sour, it separates into whey at the bottom and protein flakes on top. When you remove the whey, you are left with a kind of cottage cheese.
At the end there is a spinneret with holes so fine that you do not end up with noodles, but fine fibres that are thinner than hair. The company then spins these fibres into yarns, which it says have a silk-like texture. These can then be used to make jersey or woven fabrics, or other textiles like felt. Crucially, when a garment made completely from QMilk fibres is no longer wanted, it can simply be composted at home, Domaske says.
The dye that is added to clothing also needs to be removed before it the yarn can be recycled Credit: Getty Images. After working for years at a design company in Germany, Renana Krebs saw behind the scenes how poor the textiles and clothing industry is for the environment.
She vowed to do something about it and in , she started Algalife, making fibres and dyes from algae. Algae is already widely used in the beauty industry, in certain foods and it is used to make biofuels.
One benefit is the algae are harvested in a closed system, meaning there is no freshwater used in the process at all. All the algae need to grow is water and sunlight. By extracting natural colourings from different types of algae, Krebs and her team have been able to combine these with enzymes and fixative agents — which help to bind the pigment to a fabric — from synthetic and natural sources, including oak galls, pomegranate rind and juniper needles. They have also been able to produce fibres that can turned into yarns by purifying proteins from the algae or even using them to produce a bio-oil that can be turned into bioplastic fibres.
Prajapati has also been working with colleagues at De Montfort University to produce enzymes that could potentially make the clothes dying process more sustainable. Currently most textiles are coloured using synthetic dyes, which are petroleum derivatives, and patterned with complex processes.
These processes can require temperatures of up to C for cotton, nylon and wool, but higher for polyester and other synthetic fibres. On top of this, the process requires high pressures, long processing times and the use of additional chemicals such as acids and alkalis, which are harmful towards the environment in large quantities.
Prajapati and her colleagues have been developing processes that use enzymes so that textile dyes and patterning of fabrics can be done temperatures as low as 50C, at atmospheric pressure and pH conditions around neutral without the use of additional chemicals. Pigments made by Algalife have similar benefits, plus the added benefit of being created from renewable sources, says Krebs.
You can even drink the dye they produce, she says. Algalife is now working with a major retail fashion brand and hope to have clothes made from algae in stores by Other major brands across the fashion industry are starting to pay attention to the demand for more sustainable practices. Companies like Adidas, that recently announced a range of trainers made from ocean plastic. Recycled cotton, naturally circular. Responsible fabrics.
What is recycled cotton? What are the benefits of recycled cotton fabrics? Responsible production process. Eco-friendly certification based on composition percentages. Official certification. If you are interested in this Textil Santanderina product, please get in touch with us. No doubt, it would be ideal if all those cotton clothes could simply be recycled into new garments when their time was up.
It would keep millions of tons of waste out of landfills, and allow the fashion industry to use far less virgin material, in turn cutting use of water, pesticides, and chemicals for dyeing. To create a new piece of clothing from old clothes, the old clothes first have to be chopped up and turned back into raw material. Staple length plays an important role in determining the strength and softness of cotton threads. The longer the staple, the better these characteristics, which is why cotton varieties with extra-long staple lengths, such as supima , are highly valued—and why fashion brands currently find it difficult to use any large amount of recycled cotton in their products.
The company is experimenting with blending recycled fibers with long-staple fibers to solve the problem. But so far nobody has come up with the kind of large-scale solution that could change the whole industry.
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