Team members: Ji Hwan Shin, Dominick Nardone
Topic: Tech led innovation to support sustainable fashion
Inspired by the text of Sarah Scaturro related to technology and fashion, my team and I decided to focus on technology at the different stages of the fashion garment: its creation, consumption and disposal. I focused on the latter. Concerning the disposal stage of a garment, most of the fashion waste ends up in landfills, only a small portion is recycled through thrift stores or recycling companies. Moreover, with the fast fashion industry producing more and more cheap and stylish garments, people are disposing more and more clothes, which are saturating the landfills. Therefore, it is important to find new ways to recycle these clothes and some brands have started to do more research on how technology can help achieve this.
During the presentation I started by giving some statistical facts about fashion disposal so my classmates realize how big is the impact of the fashion waste and also mentioned that recycling can be difficult especially as most of the clothes are made out of blended fibres, therefore it is difficut to fully separate them. Then I gave some examples of apps that collect clothes in order to recycle them, either by selling them as second hand products or by selling them to recycling factories. One of these apps is called Regain, which offers discounts in return to people who donate, so this is a great incentive to promote recycling. After that, I explained the differences between mechanical recycling and chemical recycling of textiles. Mechanical recycling is one of the methods more used nowadays but a disadvantage is that it doesn’t separate blended fibres and it only works with natural fibres. The chemical recycling gives better results but it envolves a waste of water and the use of polluting chemicals, therefore it is not sustainable either.
When I was doing my research about methods of recycling clothes, I found two examples that seemed very interesting to me. The first one is a method called “Hydrothermal method” developed by a giant of fast fashion, H&M, in collaboration with the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel. This method fully separates cotton and polyester blends into new fibres, and it only uses heat, water and less than 5% biodegradable green chemical, therefore it seem a good innovation. Another interesting example I found was the campaign run by Nike “Reuse a shoe”, where they collect in their stores any kind of shoe, that they transform then into Nike grind in order to make playgrounds, Nike apparel, footwear and equipment products. At the end I also highlighted the importance of how we could reuse our clothes more and consume less in order to prevent more and more fashion waste.
Finally, I found a video made by H&M where they show part of the mechanical recycling of textiles process, so I thought it would be nice to show it to my classmates as H&M is a known brand and probably they have bought some of their products. Although the video is well done and appealing, a lot more needs to be done, but companies are changing their schemes. For instance, H&M has a campaign of collecting clothes and even I have donated twice because they offer discounts to buy new of their products, which is a good example of circular economy. It is about time so the whole fashion industry changes and make better use of technology.
Sources:
Scaturro, Sarah. “Eco-Tech Fashion: Rationalizing Technology in Sustainable Fashion.” Fashion Theory, vol. 12, no. 4, 2008, pp. 469–488., doi:10.2752/175174108×346940
https://www.ourldb.com/news/2018/1/21/from-nike-reuse-a-shoe-to-nike-grind
http://trashisfortossers.com/how-to-recycle-old-clothing/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/giveit-free-donation-pick-up/id1060354246?mt=8