Fashion Manufacturing Goes Green

Reusable bags are quickly taking their place in the world of high fashion; in turn, the fashion world is attempting to meet them halfway with a shifting trend toward eco-friendly fabrics and a general greenification of the manufacturing process. Natural and organic fabrics have already made their way into the mainstream, but this week Treehugger explored eight lesser-known processes and fabrics taking fashion to new heights of sustainability.

Topping the list is air-dying, which tackles the current problem of material waste in the process of dying textiles. New methods are promising to drastically cut the amount of resources needed to color fabrics:

During the dying process, water is used to apply color, but also to push the fabrics through machines. New machines by companies like Fongs are using air to push the fabrics, thus reducing the amount of water used. With this method, the dying of a t-shirt can go from requiring 200 to using only 50 liters of water (Textile World).

Another, more eco sound, alternative is a system called AirDye, which works with proprietary dyes that are heat-transferred from paper to fabric in a one-step process. This can save between seven and 75 gallons of water in the dying of a pound of fabric, save energy, and produces no harmful by-products.

Along with processes, however, are new and sustainable takes on materials. Cork, PET bottles, stinging nettles, seaweed, banana fibers, and recycled fabrics are all finding new life on the cutting edge of fashion:

[Alternative materials] include, for example, fabrics made with nylon recovered from products like nets and carpets by Mipan. An example of the use of this is the swimwear line Eco Panda.

Some factories are also recycling cotton industrial leftovers, which keeps these scraps from incinerators or landfills and creates new materials. One example is the Italian initiative EcotecProject.

Overall, the verdict is in: the fashion world is on the precipice of some major green changes. The big question is whether they will pass as a fad or catch on permanently. Would you wear recycled materials? Are alternative plant fibers really so radically different from cotton? Let us know!

Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Blog Bites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.