Blog Posts - Refinity - circulair textiel product ontwerp - tips, tools & inspiratie

Food waste(d) materials

29/8/2017

"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.

Material passport for textile items

25/7/2017

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.

Dutch people buy to much clothes

1/6/2017

We have too much clothes and we buy too much is recently shown in the study “Measuring the Dutch Clothing Mountain”. A Dutch wardrobe typically contains 173 items of clothing, of which no less than fifty items have not been worn during the past year. That is almost 1/3 of the total amount in our wardrobe! I was part of this research and would like to share with you the findings.

Dissolvable yarn used in workwear: disassembly is possible

28/3/2017

Three years ago I wrote an article about a dissolvable yarn that makes disassembly possible. At that time the yarn was a prototype and not yet for sale on the open market. But now, three years later Groenendijk Bedrijfskleding made safety vests with this yarn. Sander Jongerius, CSR manager of Groenendijk Bedrijfskleding tells about their development process.

The tetris of design: Zero Waste Pattern Cutting

26/2/2017

Timo Rissanen

To create zero waste with a textile design there are multiple options. For example fully fashioned knitwear, 3D printing or not designing at all (probably not your preferred option). The most known option is Zero Waste Pattern Cutting (ZWPC) and in this blog article I am going to give a few examples.

Tiny design improvements each day

29/1/2017

How to deal with sustainability information overload and start improving your design?
In this blog article I am going give you some tips on how to deal with it, hoping you feel you can make a change and start with it today.

A few years ago circular economy was a new concept, just like Cradle-to-cradle before that, now I believe we have the knowledge and tools available to make a circular economy happen. But why didn’t it happen yet? It is important that enough people start to understand the concept, find it important and act upon it. Knowing is a totally different concept than doing.

Collective for textile interlocking systems

18/12/2016

I love interlocking systems because they make design for disassembly, repair and reuse possible. This time I found one which I would like to share with you because it goes beyond concept, you can actually buy these items and wear them.

Do you still use the job title "fashion designer"?

19/10/2016

In the article of September I wrote that I think mindset is the biggest issue we have to overcome to change towards a circular economy. Thereby I mean changing from seeing the importance towards freeing time to make a change in your daily work. We are all busy keeping up with our duties that it is an extra effort to stop, reflect and act.

What can a designer do to change this mindset?

9 shifts to make a circular textile economy possible

27/9/2016

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:

Cleaning textiles eco-effective

23/7/2016

Habits...doing things in a particular way for so long that we forget to consider the possibility that something can be done differently. I think washing textiles at home is such a topic.

For consumers it is common to wash textiles with water and soap and occasionally dry-cleaning (with perc, a carcinogenic substance) or steaming. Why are textiles washed? To eliminate stains and odour. And even if these are not present the textiles are washed just to give the idea of cleanliness. I wrote an blog article in 2012 about this topic.

Washing with hot water and soap in a machine is harmful for the environment:

It costs energy to heat up the water
It costs water
Soap goes down the drain and not all soaps are fully biodegradable or friendly to the aquatic environment, they might cause oxygen levels to drop which makes it hard (or impossible) for aquatic living creatures to survive.
Washing materials from non-biodegradable plastic (PET, Polypropylene) creates microfibres that end up in oceans. (Read more about this at The Guardian)
And washing in a machine is not only harmful for the environment, it damages your textiles as well, because textiles rub and spin around each other.

How do we get clean textiles?

Yes, you read it correctly: I changed the terminology, I am not talking about “ washing” because the end purpose is clean clothes and there are multiple ways to do this without water.

First of all: it is time to change the perception of “cleanliness”

Is the item really dirty? Feel it, smell it, look at it...
Maybe it is enough to remove the odour by letting it hang a few days outside?
Is it needed to clean the whole item? Or is it possible to clean the stains only?

Techniques to clean textiles
Use different materials: wool can be easily aired or steamed. Or nano-enhanced textiles. (‘nano’ means really tiny. At the moment researchers don’t know much the effects of nano-materials on human and nature. Because the particles are so small they could enter our skin. This can be good (biodegradable materials that heal the body for example) but we do not know the long term effects of e.g. silver entering the body.

CO2 to clean textiles
CO2 is a useful substance, I did a project about dyeing with CO2 instead of water and an article about removing dye.

Ultrasonic technology
For this technology you do need water, but no detergent, rubbing or spinning anymore.