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?

“Is it always necessary to add certain functions to products in order to market them as odour-controlling or water-proof in the most extreme situations, which many people may never encounter? Is there an over reliance on functional treatments? And who is asking for these functions?” This asked Tone Skardal Tobiasson herself in an article she wrote for Ecotextile News magazine.[1] She is the editor of NICE.

This made me think. Maybe we go too far and innovate for the sake of innovating while we could better ask ourselves the question: What does the user want to do with his product?

Going back to the subject of odour-control specifically. “Some fibres naturally repel odours. Synthetics do not, quite the opposite. Cotton absorbs smell, but recent research from the Norwegian Institute for Consumer Research has found that it can also be aired out. I also found that synthetics treated with so-called odour-control, or nano-silver, smelled less than untreated synthetics, but more than wool and cotton that was exposed to the same amount of sweat.”

You must note that there also exist synthetic sportswear that have special hollow fibres with specific shapes, that are knitted or woven in such a way that they move the skinmoisture away from the skin to the outside of the fabric where it can evaporate, for example Advansa Coolmax. This means not all synthetic fabrics will smell badly.

But maybe it is good to think again if a specific function on that high level is really needed, or that a natural fabric can do the job as well with the right care from the users. It just depends on the functionality a user is seeking.