Function Fabric

Cellulosic mono-material performance textile designed focusing on circular design for Lenzing TM and Flocus TM
Recognitions:
100% jurylike at Performance Days
Finalist in Danish Design Award 2021

 

PURPOSE AND FUNCTION

To create a fabric with moister-management properties in 100 % cellulosic mono-material fibres, which ensures it to be a part of circular economy with low resource demanding recycling.

MOTIVATION / DIFFERENCE

Textile recycling is resource demanding. Neither we nor the climate can afford to make products where raw material will be downcycled or discarded after being used only once.This textile is changing the game as the afterlife is taken into account already in the design process. Many textiles, especially performan- ce-textiles, are a blend of synthetic and cellulosic fibres.The recycling process requires more resources than of mono-material textiles, as the two components must be separated. If not, part of, or the whole textile will end up as landfill. From 2022 textile waste must be recycled as household waste. With this material we have foreseen this situation and designed a textile to match future requirements.This textile is designed to be the first 100% cellulosic mono-material with moister-management properties.

• This material can be recycled in a low resource demanding process and can be used again as raw- material The technique used is combining already existing methods, materials and knowhow in a new way with high functionality and recycling as the prime focus.
• It is an economical and environmental gain for the society, and with the rising prices on raw material, also for textile mills and apparel brands.
• It is classified as moister management fabric, with the same values as conventional polyester/cellulosic blend fabrics.
• Being a 100% cellulose fabric it can be recycled in one process; the product is turned into wood pulp and made into pure raw material.

DOCUMENTATION

Being the 2nd most pollutive industry, a new way to exploit, what we have, has to become a new way of thinking and designing for the textile industry.
The polyester, that normally would be part of a moister-management fabric, has be substituted with Flocus TM KAPOK (non-food fruit of the Kapok tree). Kapok is an extraordinary hollow fibre, means isola- ting, and the fibre has a wax film, it is hydrophobic.

  • Modal is an absorbing cellulosic fibre (from wood pulp).We have used LenzingTM Modal Black.
  • Dope-dying is dying in the fibre-making process (saves a lot of water and other resources)
  • We have made a yarn blend of kapok and modal. Because the modal fibre is already dyed, we did not have to dye the kapok, just adapt to having a melange yarn.This way we could spare the properties of the kapok.This is the yarn for the skinside of the fabric.
    The outer side of the fabric is made of yarn in 100% modal, which is absorbing.
    Spin the yarn with very special care because of the kapok which is a fine and very short fibre, hence difficult to tie to the other fibres and knit with care, still because of the kapok fibre, a double textile construction.

In the test the textile has been classified it as moister management fabric with excellent values (4-5 in the AATCC’s test)
Both materials and fibre producers are very sustainable, so is dope-dye. It’s too much to explain here, and these properties have no influence on what I specifically have chased for the purpose.