Clothing Recycling

As economies shift, so do the relations between the First and the Third World. The sweatshop manufacturers of the South East Asia - traditional areas of cheap labour that produce many of the fashion goods bought in western shops - are disappearing as their country's economies grow stronger. These countries may well begin to rival the West in both economic and design terms. Like the rise of Japanese designers in the second half of the 20th century, the fashion world can look forward to the time when fashion innovations come from designers from Malaysia, Korea and Taiwan who will swell the ranks of the current generation of new designers from non-traditional fashion producing sources such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Scandinavia.

A recent success of the fashion industry, has been the acknowledgement of consumers willingness to recycle: we have all at one time or another, either through circumstances or through choice, worm secondhand clothing, may be as hand-me-downs or from one of the growing number of designer second-hand clothes stores. We are also more open to the concept of recycling because we have experienced it in a whole range of other areas, for example in the packaging of cosmetics from pioneers The Body Shop. Likewise many fashion garments already include quantities of recycled materials.

Tencel is a regenerated fibre produced by dissolving woodpulp - itself a waste product of the paper-making industry - in amine oxide, a chemical commonly found in shampoo. These fibres are considerably stronger than cotton and win Tencel fabrics are printed on T-shirts with reactive dyes, they require no polluting caustic treatment. Called the newest high tech natural fibre, Tencel is now a popular choice with jeans manufacturers: Calvin Klein, Gap, Levi's Silvertaps and Doc Martin Apparel are all using Burlington Denims, Tencel injected denim; meanwhile Swift Denim have produced Soda Pop Denim, a blend of cotton and Fortrel Echospun: six plastic soda pop bottles find their way into each pair of jeans and not into a landfill site.

Fibre technology could reduce the number of clothes we wear. When garments made fromDuPont’s Thermax are worn next to the skin, the skin is kept warm and dry by a wicking action, transferring any cooling body moisture into a more absorbent outerwear garment. Alternatively, artificial intelligence fibres automatically adjusted garments colour from black to white and vise versa, according to temperature, making the wearer psychologically feel warmer. In organic carbon particles added to fibres can warm the body of the wearer by converting near infrared radiation from sunlight into thermal energy.