In yesterday's post we mentioned the Index Award biennale (launched by the Danish nonprofit organisation The Index Project). For today let's continue looking at some of the nominees for this year, taking into considerations projects focused on recycling materials or reducing waste.
Some of them, such as Kvadrat's Really Textile Tabletop™, regard the production of new textiles. The Really Textile Tabletop™ consists in a low impact, circular textile waste product designed for conscious office interiors. Kvadrat mentions on its site a research by BBC News estimating that 92 million tonnes of textiles waste are created each year and the equivalent to a rubbish truck full of clothes ends up in landfill every second.
Moving from this data, the company looked at the possibility of creating a tabletop entirely based on waste that instead of wood and wood composites, employs upcycled textiles and but no water, chemicals or dyes (besides, the binder used in the product is 20% second generation BICO plastic from waste streams and 10% bio-binder from waste feed-stock). In this way the manufacturer reduces Co2 emission from an average 50Co2Kg conventional tabletop to 12Co2Kg for a Textile Tabletop™.
Textile-wise among the award nominees this year there’s also BFlex®, a stretch yarn developed by Italian Giovanni Benelli/ BFlex®, in collaboration with Danish textile design Studio MLR.
Most garments, including basic T-shirts and jeans, incorporate elastic materials as stretch is essential for longevity. Yet, while this fuel-based fiber guarantees comfort, when a garment containing elastic fibers is to be recycled at end-of-life, a problem arises as the material must be split to cellulosic and fuel-based parts to get pure raw materials.
This implies an expensive process which is the main reason why very little of these products are recycled back to pure raw materials. BFlex® eliminates the problem since it is a stretch yarn made of only one fiber, a mono-material without adding any fuel-based elements.
Recycling can also be interpreted as a fun fashion game, Ukrainian designers Natasha Fistchenko and Masha Timoshenko tell us. To this aim they created CNSTR, a modular "clothing constructor system" consisting of broken parts of garments made from recycled materials that can be assembled, disassembled and reassembled together to form a variety of designs thanks to a series of zippers integrated in strategic places.
Wearers can therefore create multi-functional clothes made from recycled materials and in a universal size. By being able to vary sections of the garments, wearers take part in the creative process, coming up with dresses, jackets and jumpsuits characterized by flexibility and adaptability.
For fashion fans who like to add an arty twist to their wardrobes, there's The Trench Factory (TFF).
TTF sources second hand coats and then gives them to selected artists who create painted or embroidered interventions on the coats. The items are then numbered and sold with the artist's name on the label. In this way the garments are given a higher value as they are turned into unique arty pieces and the lifecycle of each design is extended.
Among the accessory offers, instead, there are the BackToMarket® Earthy sneakers by "CCILU" (CHEE-loo) made from multiple agriculture and aquaculture material and wastes.
The shoe vamp material is made with Sorona® fabric, derived from corn glucose, which is two times anti-UV, anti-Chlorine, and more resilient than conventional sneaker fabric. The Sorona® upper reduces the petroleum-based fabric by 38% and the carbon emission by 63%.
The upper lining is made instead with SeaWool®, a material combining upcycled oyster shell wastes and plastic bottles, and the soles with bamboo and tea stalks wastes as a substitution material for petroleum-based materials.
When it comes to fashion products there's also the packaging to consider, and among the projects submitted for the Index Award there is a PET Pleated Bag that recycles transparent PET bottles.
The global annual number of discarded PET bottles exceeds 500 billion, but only 7% of the total amount is recyclable. To make the PET Pleated bag, bottles are recycled, crushed into white filaments, spun into yarn, and woven into a fabric that is then pleated to create a multi-layered texture. No dyes are added in the process and the resulting bags are more flexible than fabric, yet very sturdy which makes them perfect for everyday uses such as shopping.
E-commerce has made it easier to buy the products we want or need online, but it has certainly increased the use of packaging materials that end up in landfills as recycling alone is not enough to reduce environmental impact of waste generated by e-commerce companies, that also end up spending a lot of money on single-use packaging.
RE-ZIP is instead designed to meet the growing demand for sustainable and circular packaging: customers can return the RE-ZIP package through parcel shops, lockers, mailboxes and other Drop Points via the RE-ZIP app to the RE-ZIP Hub. Here they are cleaned and sent to webshops that in this way save up to 100% on packaging costs by reusing the same materials multiple times.
There are more projects to discover on The Index Award page and, if you have your own project or design to improve lives (or want to nominate someone's project), you can do it at this link (deadline: 31st March).
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