PPB August 2019

Bio-Synthetic Fabric Fabric made using bio-synthetic yarn is produced from organic sources, like bamboo, banana tree leaves, chitin (crab and shrimp shells), corn husk fibers, cupro (cotton plant lintels), milk, seaweed, soy rayon, Tencel and viscose (wood cellulose). The yarn is made by cooking cellulose or polymers into a semiliquid mixture, then pumping the mixture through the small holes of a spinneret, which produces fiber threads that can be woven into yarn. These yarns are often moth-proof, may be hypoallergenic, are machine-washable and can imitate the properties of other fibers, like silk and wool, though the fibers can be itchy, have little elasticity and retain less heat. Natural Sources Some of the natural sources may prove rather unusual and less common, with fibers extracted frommushrooms and seaweed (both pictured at right), wood, soybeans and coconut fibers, and fish leather as a leather substitute. MycoWorks, a San Francisco-based startup that produces sustainable goods and apparel from fungi, creates leather substitutes using mushrooms; Ananas Anam, a manufacturer in the UK, makes Piñatex, a natural textile made from pineapple leaf fibers. Then, there’s hagfish slime and spoiled milk. Scientists found that when a hagfish—an eel-shaped fish—responds to predators, it releases a slimy substance containing twisted protein fibers housed in mucus. The mucus absorbs water, which causes the protein fibers to expand, creating a dense mixture of slime and water that can grow to 10,000 times its original size. Each individual fiber can expand up to 30 centimeters in length, and produces a strong, silk-like hand. In the case of milk, an individual t-shirt can be made using less than a half-gallon of spoiled milk—which would have been discarded anyway—and produces an incredibly soft feel. (No, it doesn’t smell like rotten milk.) Recycled Fabric In The Colorado King, author Stephen King writes, “Sooner or later, everything old is new again,” and so it goes with recycled fabric. Manufacturers can give new life—and new love—to tattered and discarded clothing while offering an eco-friendly solution to the million tons of textile waste generated annually by American factories. Two of the most commonly recycled fabrics are nylon and polyester. Nylon fibers (pictured at right) are made frompetroleum, andmost recycled nylon is derived from recycled plastic bottles, though even when recycled and converted into a fabric, it remains non-biodegradable and can take between 20 and 200 years to decompose in a landfill. Similar in scope to recycled polyester, REPREVE—amaterial created by the eponymous company that manufactures products sold by Patagonia, Ford and The North Face—makes clothing using recycled plastic bottles. In this process, the bottles are collected and chopped, then ground, melted and reformed into REPREVE chips, melted again andmade into a REPREVE recycled fiber that is 100 percent recycled plastic. The fiber is then used tomake clothing. Between 2007 and 2015, REPREVE recycledmore than two billion plastic bottles. | AUGUST 2019 | 15 INNOVATE