Zero waste design
My guess is that this herald’s the demise of the patchwork quilt:
Zero-waste design strives to create clothing patterns that leave not so much as a scrap of fabric on the cutting room floor. This is not some wacky avant-garde exercise; it’s a way to eliminate millions of tons of garbage a year.
And the worst offender is, of all things, the ubiquitous blue jean:
“Jeans are one of the most wasteful and polluting garments that are made,” said Mr. Collins of Parsons, citing not only the unused fabric, but also the dyes added only to be washed out again, the energy used to transport the denim all over the world, the packaging, and the gallons of water used by consumers to clean the jeans. “And of course it’s one of the staples of everyone’s wardrobe.”
Not mine; I decided quite some time ago that jeans weren’t flattering to me, and I don’t ordinarily wear them. Who knew in doing so I’d be striking a blow for the environment?
According to a History Channel show, denim scraps are used to make US paper currency – it’s what gives it durability…!
That’s not really a great article – someone is tasking students with coming up with them, not the industry trying to do it.
Further, from what you quote: “but also the dyes added only to be washed out again, the energy used to transport the denim all over the world, the packaging, and the gallons of water used by consumers to clean the jeans” – what is inherent about jeans there?
Do you wash you clothes – I bet so, do they use dyes only to see them fade in stuff you wear? Yep, and I’ll be interested to see clothes that ship themselves without using energy.
This is about as useful as the car some engineering students made a few years back that they used to travel from one coast to the other and averaged several hundred miles per gallon – it only went 15 mph at maximum.
It’s not a *bad* thing to do and is about as great as students are going to do, but highly experienced engineers and developers are highly paid and in demand for a reason. I’ve moved back and forth between academics and commercial software design several times and the vast majority of life long academics just can’t figure out why their students great designs aren’t sweeping the nation – often because people want to go faster than 15 mph, risk certain death if the car ran off the road, and not have to be a full time mechanic for the average once a week repair session.
I’m subscribed to a couple of sewing magazines. Both are touting lots of ways to sew “green,” including the zero-waste design. Somebody at least wrote in to call one of the mags on how sanctimonious they sounded. Less waste can be good, but who wants to go around in zero-waste clothes all of the time? We might just as well go back to the days of the Romans and wear bedsheets. 😉
Knitwear by its very nature eliminates cutting-room waste. Even if is knit garment is sewn, in most cases the pieces are knit to shape.
In more advanced technology, all shaping is done on the knitting machine itself:
http://www.shimaseiki.com/product/knit/mach2x/index2.html
http://www.stoll.com/
Well, it might be one way to get Teh Won out of his mom jeans if he’s ever again invited to throw a ceremonial baseball pitch.
… Wouldn’t it make more sense to design low-scrap clothing, set up a system to re-use the scraps (I know I’ve got a large amount of leather scraps to use in crafting– I’d love to get the same thing with jean fabric!) and phase in the lower waste designs as they replace machinery?
It’s not like “I totally rebuild my factory” is a zero-waste action.
Shoot, given how much clothing is cotton these days, composting is another option, if you can’t get someone to buy bulk scraps for cheap.
Possibly a large part of the problem is that these factories are sufficiently remote in relation to alternative use opportunities that it’s cheaper to pay to haul them off than to recycle/reduce/reuse.
I gotta say, seeing some enviro-folks going for the second R in that gives me hope they might, eventually, get to the third one in my life time.
So we’re going to use the 15-20% of fabric that to date has been discarded. That will lead to additional savings in cleaning and disposal costs.
Great! This is a terrific opportunity to demonstrate that the green economy works. I look forward to a meaningful drop in the price of clothing, especially at the budget end.
(But perhaps, as usual, I have overlooked crucial nuances of green progressivism.)
*reads through* Wait, some folks wash their jeans in HOT water? I mean, when they’re not soaked with oil or something?
….
How about a college class in “talk to somebody who’s halfway decent at saving money”? I’d volinteer my grandmothers, if they weren’t dead. (Both of whom saved and reused wrapping paper, tin foil, butter/cottage cheese/whip topping containers, etc)
How about jean skirts? Or jean jackets??
Strcpy, I agree that engineering students rarely come up with anything good (being that I was one myself once and now I know what I didn’t know back then). Being a student does not inherently make one an insightful genius.
At my college, I remember a bunch of art students were tasked with a project of coming up with dwelling units out of garbage/junk etc. First of all, I was like, why are art students designing houses in the first place. Second of all, they were basically mud huts with tires and glass mashed into the walls. If we wanted to go back to mud huts, we could all move to Africa thank you very much. I don’t exactly see a stampede in that direction.
At least it was good for a few laughs.
This is just a snotty elitist sales gimmick, sort of like Naomi Campbell’s anti-fur campaign that lasted until fur became hot again. The bulk of jeans wearers do not shop at Barneys, and many probably wear their jeans a lot longer than any Barneys customer wears anything in her wardrobe.
Specific problems: 1) 60 inch fabric is bad. Any width that is optimal for one size will be wasteful for others. I suspect that for jeans and any standard pants, fabric wastage has been minimized, especially in contrast to blouses and dresses that change shape every year.
2) Blue dye washes out. Fellow designers are the ones who made faded and torn jeans a fashion item. Your standard Levis and Wrangler wearers let their jeans age naturally and wear them till they are really worn out, even if they are worn mostly for grubby work at the end.
3) Saris don’t waste any fabric, but I wouldn’t wear them climbing ladders or in a machine shop or planting tomatoes in my garden.
4) The masses of a single type of waste fabric would be much easier to recycle than the ods and ends of synthetic blends used in most clothing. Aren’t they making all those outdoor rugs out of old shopping bags? It sure seems like you could do something with tons of denim scraps.
5) If this guy is so smart, why isn’t he still running his own designing business? Maybe he wasn’t so efficient, and maybe the world wasn’t beating a pathh to his door.
6 ) People in the Hamptons are likely to wear their Barney jeans to one garden party and then have to waste energy getting back into Manhattan for next week’s party attire.
7) There is a danger that Michelle might take on sustainable clothing as her next project and we would be deluged in pix of her rear 24/7 for a whole season.
8) What will Vivian Westwood say?
9) Did Parsons reach its pinacle with its 60s table? I don’t think this will be the way to make the news again.
How did that emticon get in my list? I don’t know nuthin bout moticons.
If you type 8 followed by ), you get a free emoticon. Consider it a bonus.
Come to think of it the whole green/global warming movement smacks of college kids given enough power that the whole world has to actually participate in their dumb*ss class projects.
SteveH:
You just described the U.S. government in the year 2010.
You know what evil capitalists use zero or minimal waste designs for? To increase, you might want to sit down, profit. Yes, this movement is playing right into the hands of the capitalist pigs by working to discover ways to increase profit.
It must be a terrible burden to be working to save the planet all the time.
Let’s get real. Cotton is cheap and a renewable resource.
The indigo used to dye blue jeans and other xotton fabrics blue was a plant product too. Its growth on SC plantations was terminated by the Civil War. If memory serves, the shortage thereof was one of the stimuli for development of organic chemistry in Germany. Germany became the world’s leader in organic chemistry, and held that place for decades. Consider IG Farben…Farben means colors auf Deutsch.
Non-sythezised indigo and cotton are natural, renewable products, sustainable, eco-friendly. Did I leave any Green code words out?The complaint quoted by Neo is thus a complaint about human labor.
Seeking to optimize patterns cut out of a larger piece of material, in order to minimize waste, isn’t exactly new. I read that in the 1930s, Donald Douglas (of Douglas Aircraft) was distressed at the amount of aluminum left over as scrap after airplane parts were cut out of a sheet of aluminum (I believe this was for the DC-2) and resolved in the future to ensure that the parts designers were better connected to the production process.
I’m pretty sure there are now computer programs that figure out how to cut specific piece-patterns out of a piece of fabric with minimum waste…the missing piece may have been designing the pieces themselves with an eye to ensuring optimum manufacturibility.
“I’m pretty sure there are now computer programs that figure out how to cut specific piece-patterns out of a piece of fabric with minimum waste”
It is called a “bin packing algorithm” and is actually quite processor intensive and considered a “hard” problem (hard means it takes a long time, not difficult to learn/write).
Anyway, I guess the more you know 🙂
You can have my britches when you take them from my cold dead legs!
lol
Sorry, Neo, you just kicked off a pet peeve:
My guess is that this herald’s the demise of the patchwork quilt:
Superfluous apostrophes of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose, because you shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Okay, I’ll shut up now. Sorry.
If the greens really want tips on conserving denim in clothing production they should ask Levi Strauss and Wrangler. They have the most incentive to minimize wastage because their stockholders are paying for the materials.
Is that too difficult for a leftie mind to comprehend?
Oh yeah! Never mind.
“the gallons of water used by consumers to clean the jeans.”
OMG – aren’t we still going to wash the same amount of clothing regardless?
I hate these people.
“Is that too difficult for a leftie mind to comprehend? ”
Recall most of these are young college professors and students. The leaders grew up watching Captain Planet wherein the villain simply wanted to pollute and the ecoteers were out to stop them. I clearly recall two episode (I was never a lefty and these always seemed stupid) where they cut an entire old growth tree down for a single toothpick and another about how cute and cuddly bears were along with the ecoteers holding the cubs and the mother bear looking at them and making cooing sounds.
Once you realize this type of thing is where their knowledge originate at then things make a WHOLE lot more sense. Turner didn’t pull Captain Planet out of his backside, it was based on then current (and more than not still current) conventional thinking in the “green” world.
I’m re-reading old Stephen King books I did in middle/high school. Lots of amusing things in there I had forgotten. Lots of diatribes about nuclear power, Reagan going to blow the world up, and many of the other lefty propaganda I was being fed in school. It is quite funny to read especially when he gets on a rant about how engineers know nothing and only his fellow environmental caring people know the truth – every one is sheep being led by the govt. I did not recall this stuff at all from back then, even most die hard greens roll their eyes at it now.
I rather suspect that our current green movement will suffer the same fate 20-50 years from now and in another 100 or so many of those ideas will get the same derision that “snake oil” and other types of things get now. But then those times will have thier own versions floating around too.
As I recall part of the … ummm… Easy Rider culture, is to wear one pair of filthy, smelly jeans until they are no longer usable and never wash them. They call them “originals”. Sounds green (and unsanitary) to me.
Wm Lawrence……
Where do you think the term “green” actually came from?
As a quilter, I would like to say that patchwork is alive and well. We prefer 100% cotton, but there are some quilters who will use anything.
But, there are some current trends which include making quilts from old clothes (men’s shirts, ties, t-shirts, jeans, etc) as well as trimming and organizing scraps from past projects so that a scrappier quilt can be made.
Some people are using the trimmed selvages (edges of fabric) that have the color dots and fabric identification to make quilts.
And, the fabric companies are selling “pre-cuts” – or fabric lines that are cut into strips, squares, triangles. It saves time for quilters and uses the fabric in the most efficient manner. And, some of the companies do bag up the selvages and sell them!
If the greens applied this same concern to unsustainable govt waste they’d be conservatives. But obviously thats a no no because people could then afford the oppulence of a pair of pants.
Liz- one of the wonderful things my grandfather the lumberjack left for all his then-living grandchildren was a jean quilt of their own. ^.^
What you’ve highlighted is the difference between academia and regular folks. Academics and students spend time (and the resulting expense) on minimizing the scrap fabric. The people who actually sew stuff are thinking, “Cool, more leftover fabric. Time to make another quilt.” Funny how people centuries ago already had this figured out – without any “green” sensibility.
From the article:
“We’re offended by 15 percent waste in fabric.” (emphasis added)
When is someone on the left never offended?
I second both *expat and David Foster.
My first diploma is in industrial engineering/automated cold and hot die-press processes. Within one of the mandatory courses in the curriculum we were taught how to position detail on the sheet of metal for cold stamping (steel, aluminium, etc) so it will generate minimum of waste. It involved mirror- image for left/right details, rotation, unification, consistent orientation for future cutting, exact positioning marks, etc etc. And it was old news in 1980, in Central Russia (full disclosure…alas yes, I’m that old)
Later, in teh 90’s, my ex-husband was doing some CNC-programming that involved getting computer to calculate these things rather than a human, with much more productivity.
But yes, these aspects were subject of creative thinking of seamstresses and patternmakers for centuries – starting, I believe, along with machine mass-producing of fabric itself, in Industrial-Revolution England.
In Home Economics class (8th grade) our seamstress-teacher showed us how to position paper patterns on fabric to achieve most economical output.
About 60″ fabric: I thought 54″ is used mostly for commercial fabrics (drapery, upholstery) for a reason?
Leave it to the greens to reinvent the wheel and think that they’re doing something daring and new. It’s good for their self-esteem, I guess.
Any industrial process strives to minimize waste. For capitalists, it improves their bottom-line profits. And as Tatyana showed, even Soviet central planners understood the concept.
What would be funny is if our little ivy league central planners end up doing away with those wasteful baggy blue jeans and get accused of racism for it. 🙂
SteveH:
Now that rates a ‘heh’.
Liz, I was waiting for a quilter/crafter to chime in. It just goes to show how academia is out of touch — those lovely bits of fabric do not get wasted, real people have been making use of them and making lovely quilts and other crafted items from them. Ebay has had a thriving market selling said scraps, and the major quilting fabric lines have joined suite.
How long before they suggest black pajamas?
Artfldgr
How long before they suggest black pajamas?
Quote of the day. Excellent. That is a winner. Also concise (Viet Cong black pajamas..)
There will always be waste. See the Third Law of Thermodynamics. There will always be attempts to minimize waste. Which reminds me of one popularization of the Third Law: you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip, and it you could, you couldn’t get it all.
The engineer father of a childhood friend had a job description that involved minimizing and reusing metal scrap from cutting and die processes. As Tatyana points out, this did not begin yesterday.
It is good to try to minimize waste in cutting jeans, but it is also foolish to think that this is the first attempt at doing so. What is so amusing about so many lib do-gooders is that when they are actually reinventing the wheel, they think they are pioneers in doing good. As if they were the first ones to think of something!
I wonder what percentage of textile scrap is thrown out versus what percentage of textile scrap reaches the secondary market, such as for quilters. My guess is that most textile scrap is thrown out. But that is a guess.
One aspect of textile garbage/ scrap that some may not be aware of is used clothing. A lot of used US clothing ends up being shipped overseas, where it is sold as used clothing. Go to any big city in Latin America, and not so big city, and seven will get you eleven that you will find a thriving market in used US clothing. One negative aspect of this market is that it depresses the market for locally produced textiles. But there are very few acts with purely good consequences.
Correction:
“Which reminds me of one popularization of the Third Law: you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip, and if you could, you couldn’t get it all.”
Textile scraps are cut up and often become stuffing for toys, pillows, and things like couches. sometimes they add a bit of a binder
all the garbage the US has would fit into a cube around 25 miles on a side.
Capitalism is a VERY efficient system. In fact, the way it works is anything WORTH doing gets done…
it only takes a few minutes to know
[maybe they can hire me as an expert? :)]
http://www.cheaponsale.com/d-p11191393660940100-furniture_stuffing_materials/
We are the biggest supplier of high quality Polyester and Cotton (scrap) fiber for furniture stuffing materials like sofa, upholstery beds, spring mattresses frame cover, compressed sponge and various wooden / non-wooden furniture.
Charles – this is why the are offended:
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/05/28/101-being-offended/
I’ve heard that clothing in poor condition that is donated here in Germany winds up in products like shop rags. I don’t know whether it’s true. I’ve also heard that PolarTec is made of old PET bottles. There’s got to be something you could do with chopped up remnants.
expat, ive seen bundles of “rags” for shops that appeared to be just randomly cut up pieces of cloth. Not sure if it was from old clothes, or scraps or both. But its was clearly not originally meant for rags.
those rag bundles wre in the US.
“Textile scraps are cut up and often become stuffing for toys, pillows, and things like couches. sometimes they add a bit of a binder”
Indeed, we use “sock tops” – that is the scrap of cloth they cut off the top of the sock to clean the edge up – as stuffing for archery targets. We have to purchase it because there is too much money to be made selling to other industries. They sell it to us at a reduced rate due to us coming around, packaging it, and loading it ourselves into our trucks – but we still pay a decent rate for it.
I mentioned King above and another classic example of lefty thought was in The Tommynockers. The main good guy rants about nuclear waste and how by the year 2000 or so we will have contaminated and entire state with our current production of waste. It is a product of ignorance, supreme confidence in their own ideas, and an assumption that everything has a linear scale.
We have plants that produce those isotopes that are “waste”. We can’t take that excess heat and produce steam to turn turbines because that is nuclear power and is bad. So we have all the reactors and such just minus the part to produce power because the “waste” is worth so much money it is worth it to produce.
Nuclear power has VERY little real waste yet if you ask most environmentalist they will rant about the massive waste and how it will kill us all. Given the amount of evidence to the contrary I guess not knowing what the clothing industry does with scraps isn’t surprising – when they are told they don’t believe it anyway.
strcpy,
thanks for the followup…
i would like to add to your nuclear comment that we could switch to thorium, rather than uranium.
and unless someone has a matter making machine, we dont change the actual proportion of nuclear material in the world by any real percentage.
that is, all humans do is push around matter that is already here, and recombine it.
in fact one of the hardest things to do is keep natures processes from taking what you make apart too fast!!!
that is, from the moment of the creation of an object, physical properties of nature that are ongoing and cant be prevented (only shifted a while), seek to disperse whatever it is you just made.
Nothing is permanent…
Iron is most stable
and we think that even the proton may have a half life
Proton decay was, for a time, an extremely exciting area of experimental physics research. To date, all attempts to observe these events have failed. Recent experiments at the Super-Kamiokande water Cherenkov radiation detector in Japan give a lower limit of the proton half-life of 6.6é—10^33 years
> and we think that even the proton may have a half life
The key words are in your own quote, though —
Proton decay was, for a time, an extremely exciting area of experimental physics research. To date, all attempts to observe these events have failed.
Let me translate from techspeak: we thought we understood it, but maybe we were wrong.
Self-described “greens” and “environmentalists” are among the absolute worst of the lot when it comes to stupid, ignorant ideas which demonstrate no grasp of any kind of not only the problems involved but how little is really understood. If everyone who ardently proclaimed themselves in favor of the environment were lined up against a wall and shot, the collective IQ of the species would probably double.
I’d point you to two speeches by Michael Crichton… unfortunately, the geniuses at his official website have removed them for some insane reason from the offerings there.
Luckily, I’m bright enough to know about the Wayback machine, which will allow you to at least see the text, if not the images.
Aliens Cause Global Warming
and
Complexity and the Environment
The latter is literally damning to the entire notion that we have ANY idea how to manage the environment on a large scale at this point… we couldn’t even manage the environment of Yellowstone properly.
===================================
P.S., this is actually typo regarding a covert project
by Mattel to promote their new Barbie doll, a new
“Zero Waist Design”.
===================================
:oD
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