THE fashion industry is the second-largest source of industrial pollution. It is resource intensive too. Did you know that a pair of jeans needs around 6,800 liters of water to make? Thus, re-using clothes is good for the environment. It is practical too. Many kids of my generation are recipients of hand-me-down clothes.
Today, the used clothing business is booming. In the Philippines, there is a flourishing ukay-ukay business, which now a days have gone online. But what if clothes are no longer usable and fit to use? What are the alternatives? Some fabrics are either non-biodegradable or take years to degrade. Their only possible destination would be sanitary landfills, alternative fuel in cement kilns or feedstock in waste-to-energy plants.
It’s good that there are studies being done to re-use or re-purpose old clothes. Some of the technologies being developed can also address the scraps or trimmings of garments factories, like ‘L and T’ in Clark. One simple process to re-use waste clothing is to turn them into bricks.
An award winning company called FabBRICK, makes decorative and insulative bricks out of old clothes. Clarisse Merlet, the company’s founder, took notice of how much construction is a polluting and energy-intensive industry, so she decides to find a way to built differently, especially with the use of raw material wastes such as plastic bottles, cardboard or plastic cups.
Clarisse had the idea of re-using discarded clothes by making it an innovative raw material. Based on the characteristics of the recovered textiles, she designs an ecological building material both thermal and acoustic insulator. Each brick uses the equivalent of two to three T-shirts' worth of material.
The scraps are mixed with an ecological glue that Merlet developed herself, then pressed into a brick mold. This mold uses mechanical compression to form the bricks. The wet bricks are removed from the mold and set out to dry for two weeks before using. They are fire and moisture resistant, and make an excellent thermal and acoustic insulator.
Another research being done on the re-use of clothing, is to turn textile tem into glucose, or sugar. According to fiber2fashion.com, Swedish researchers have developed an environmentally friendly method to convert textile cotton into glucose, which in turn can be used to make other fabrics.
Cotton is extracted from clothes then transformed into glucose using sulfuric acid. The principle consists of decomposing the vegetable fiber of cotton (cellulose) in order to obtain smaller pieces. The fabrics are then soaked in sulfuric acid which results in an amber-colored liquid. A standard fabric scrap represents about 5 liters of sugar solution, each of which contains the equivalent of 33 sugar cubes. It can be used to make various types of textiles, including spandex and nylon. It could also be an alternative use could be to produce ethanol.
Isn’t that sweet?