Tuesday, Apr 15

Dear Reader,

The rise of fast fashion has completely made over closets, which are stuffed with cheap (and poorly made) clothes. On average, Americans buy 53 new items of clothing per year — four times as much as in the year 2000. There is, of course, the environmental cost of producing so many items of clothing (a shocking 100 billion items of clothing per year). But there’s also the issue of disposal. What happens to all those items once we’re done with them? Though secondhand stores have their place, there will nonetheless be tons of fabric that ends up in landfills. Fabric blends, which fast fashion loves because they’re cheap, complicate textile recycling initiatives — when you can’t figure out what an item is made of, it’s hard to determine how to recycle it. 

But what if fabrics could tell you what they were? What if they contained something like a barcode that could be scanned, thereby helping create a circular economy for textiles — a way to track an item from inception through to disposal or recycling? According to a story in Anthropocene, that’s exactly what some University of Michigan researchers have created: “a special tracer fiber that encodes unique information about a fabric’s composition and origin, and can be directly woven into a fabric.” 

With studies showing that many items get landfilled unnecessarily, “knowing the precise makeup of the fabric — how much cotton, spandex, and polyester is in it, say — is critical for recycling,” we’re told.

Though the best solution is to buy less and buy better (to quote Bluedot’s Marketplace motto), the next best solution is to ensure that when we’re done with an item, it is disposed of in a way that does the least harm. Any innovation that moves us toward more simple and effective recycling of textiles, including this one, is a plus for the planet. 

Materially,

Dot