Combining Flexible and Sustainable Design Principles for Evaluating Designs: Textile Recycling Application

Abstract As rates of textile manufacturing and disposal escalate, the ramifications to health and the environment through water pollution, microplastic contaminant concentrations, and greenhouse gas emissions increase. Discarding over 15.4 million tons of textiles each year, the U.S. recycles less than 15%, sending the remainder to landfills and incinerators. Textile reuse is not sufficient to de-escalate the situation; recycling is necessary. Most textile recycling technologies from past decades are expensive, create low-quality outputs, or are not industry scalable. For viability, textile recycling system designs must evolve with the rapid pace of a dynamic textile and fashion industry. For any design to be sustainable, it must also be flexible to adapt to technological, user, societal, and environmental condition advances. To this end, flexible and sustainable design principles were compared: overlapping principles were combined and missing principles were added to create 12 overarching principles encompassing design for sustainability and flexibility (DfSFlex). The Fiber Shredder was designed and built with flexibility and sustainability as its goal and evaluated on how well it met DfSFlex principles. An evaluation of the Fiber Shredder’s performance found that increased speed and processing time increase the generation of the desired output—fibers and yarns—manifesting the principles of Design for Separation in design and Facilitate Resource Recovery in processing. The development of this technology, with the application of sustainable and flexible design, fiber-to-fiber recycling using mechanical systems appears promising for maintaining value while repurposing textiles.