Cycle Cotton T Shirts
We do not want to waste even a little of the limited blessing that is natural cotton fiber. Kamakura Shirts views textile products as precious resources and strives to reduce waste. This project started with a review of the supply chain in shirt manufacturing.
Although the effective use of limited natural resources seems to be widely understood, it is still not sufficient. We hope that our approach will be beneficial to the environment.
What is a Cycle Cotton T-Shirt?
This project started with the idea of finding a better way to utilize the "fabric scraps" that are produced when cutting shirt fabric.
Since most of the patterns for shirts are curved, it is impossible to use rectangular fabric without leaving any waste. As a result, about 15% of the shirt fabric ends up as "scraps" that have to be discarded.
By collecting these scraps, we succeeded in processing them through a method called recycling, which turns them back into cotton. We then carefully spun this cotton into yarn and knitted it into fabric. And so, these scraps that were meant to be discarded have been reborn as T-shirts. This is the cotton cycle of a shirt manufacturer.
Process
Leftover Fabric Scraps
Typically, these scraps are processed at the sewing factory, which incurs industrial waste disposal costs. In this project, the scraps collected from one factory amounted to approximately 240 kg. First, these scraps are cut into pieces of about 2 to 3 cm using a specialized machine.
The Recycling Process and Cotton Blending
Here begins the recycling process.
By using rollers equipped with countless needles, the fabric scraps are combed back into fluffy cotton-like material. If we were to spin yarn using only this recycled cotton, it would lack the necessary strength, so we add organic cotton and mix it evenly. This compensates for the strength of the fabric.
Becoming Yarn
Since we use scraps from 100% cotton dress shirts, the quality of the cotton is excellent, resulting in a comfortable feel. Additionally, there is no need for dyes to color the yarn, making this an even more environmentally friendly initiative.
Details
By handling cotton with fibers intricately blended from many colors, we create fabric with a rich mélange texture. White comes from white shirts. Blue comes from blue shirts. Gray comes from shirts of colors other than white and blue.
These fabric scraps of each color have been reborn as T-shirts. The fabric is also thick enough to prevent transparency, making it stylish enough to wear on its own.