Design studio Envisions has worked with engineering company Imat-Uve to make a recycled textile from used clothing usually considered unfit for recycling.
Their textile, called Fibers Unsorted, is a technical fabric made from mixed-fibre clothing that would otherwise have gone to landfill. Instead, it is processed into a product that is durable and high-quality enough to be used in the automotive industry, among others.
Even though recycled fabrics have become more commonplace, textiles are difficult to recycle and the bulk of such waste goes into landfill.
The Fibers Unsorted project aimed to develop a high-quality recycled textile durable enough to be used in the automotive industry
"The challenge that Fibers Unsorted set was to develop a quality yarn out of the big waste streams of textile that are still today only down-cycled into a poor insulation material or get burned or end up in a landfill," Envisions director Sanne Schuurman told Dezeen. "We need to keep this resource as long as possible in its cycle and extend its lifetime to create valuable products out of it."
The difficulty in recycling textiles comes because they contain many types of fibres, materials, colours and quality levels, all jumbled together and "impossible to sort industrially", according to Envisions.
Imat-Uve worked with textiles usually considered too difficult to recycle, such as mixed-fibre clothing
The Fibers Unsorted project started with development and engineer...