Home News Technology Facebook Twitter Email WhatsApp Reddit LinkedIn Print AddThis 14 Share Daily news 3 November 2018 Your old, unwanted clothes can be turned into building materials Could waste clothes be turned into something useful? Richard Levine/Alamy Stock Photo By Alice Klein Used and unwanted clothes could be converted into building materials instead of winding up in landfill. This is using a technique whereby last season’s must-haves are shredded and turned into solid panels for floors or walls. Today’s abundance of cheap clothes and short-lived fashion trends mean that most garments are thrown out after a few seasons, generating 10 million tonnes of landfill in the US alone each year. As they gradually decompose, they release toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases. Not only is this bad for the environment, it also misses the opportunity to turn valuable clothing fibres into new products, says Veena Sahajwalla at the University of New South Wales in Australia. To create new building materials, Sahajwalla and her team collected a random assortment of garments from charity bins. After manually removing zippers, buttons, buckles and other solid bits, they passed the leftover mix of cotton, polyester, nylon and other fabrics through a fine-grained shredder. […]
Reading Time: < 1 minute
