|
|
 Suzanne Lee - Bio Couture, Photo from The Next Black film produced by AEG Last article I wrote was about repairing textiles. Today I would like to tell you more about how nature repairs and how the textile industry mimics nature, also called Biomimicry.
 "the future is not a place we're going to, it is a place we create." Tjeerd Veenhoven Textiles and non-wovens can be made out an endless number of materials.
Well known materials are for example cotton, linen, hemp, tencel (from eucalyptus), modal (from beech) or synthetic materials like recycled polyester. But there are so many more possibilities. In this article share with you some interesting materials made from fruit and vegetables.  In the beginning of this year I compared different, freely available, material passports in the Netherlands for the infrastructure coalition of MVO Nederland, called Groene Netten. At that moment I started to question myself if this would work for the textile sector as well. I am curious what your opinion is.
I am writing blog articles since January 2012. Cradle-to-cradle was the main subject, focussed on which materials and techniques make textile products suitable for biodegradation or recycling. Ones in a while it is good to take a broader view and see the shifts that are needed to make a circular economy possible, that is what I will do in this article.
Why a circular economy? Take a look at this (Dutch) video:
A few months ago I found something fascinating in the field of materials. Programmable materials. Materials that can assemble themselves in the right conditions. How can you apply these materials in an eco-effective design?
Last month I wrote to you about design for recycling and biodegradation. I would like to introduce you to a few of my pinterest boards which might be interesting to follow. With pinterest it is very easy to collect pictures of designs and materials as an inspiration. I collected inspiration about Design for biodegradation, disassembly, flexible material innovations, old textile crafts, clever designs and design methods to name a few.
Enjoy!
A while ago I asked you to send me e-mails with the problems you have when you want to apply eco-effective designing in your company. There are a lot of different aspects that keep you busy. To name a few: material choices, customer behaviour, communication, time-management, prices and supply chains. With this input I am going to write a series of articles.
One of the big frustrations is to find the right materials. Today I am going to describe to you why this is difficult and I will give you tips to overcome the issues.
 For me recycling of consumer textiles is a difficult issue. On one hand I like to work with mono-materials, knowing what is inside the material, not using toxic chemicals. Because when using recycled content, multiple fibres and chemicals are mixed which makes it difficult to know what is inside your material. On the other hand I like recycled fibres because we already have a lot of textiles that are now thrown away and that can be respun into yarn, which reduces the use of raw materials.
What do you have to know as a designer about post-consumer mechanically recycled yarns? |
Refinity's blog is alleen in het Engels beschikbaar.
Follow blog 
Categories
All
|
||||||||
RSS Feed