Urban Fibers

Description

The current industrial textile recycling methods are energy intensive and deteriorate the fiber quality. ‘Urban Fibers’ created a simplified design method to generate raw materials from locally rescued jersey cotton garments, preventing them from ending up downcycled, sent overseas, landfilled or burned. Prolonging the life of a local resource, we produce yarns optimised to be manufactured in knitting, weaving and rope making machines and we carefully design with the colours found directly in the garments, avoiding further pollution by overdyeing. Assimilating a natural process of biological resource reorganisation, our transferable model merges craft with digital, industrial techniques to put every bit of material back to use. For the production, we chose communities with machinery within Germany to promote local manufacturing. The new, digitally upcycled textiles are suited for sophisticated interior and fashion items made to disrupt the linear fiber-to-landfill production narrative.