What to do with discarded clothes
Hefashionindustryisthesecond-largestsourceofindustrial
Tpollution. It is resource intensive too. Did you know that a pair of jeans needs around 6,800 liters of water to make? Thus, re-using clothes is good for the environment. It is practical too.
Many kids of my generation are recipients of hand-me-down clothes.
Todaytheusedclothingbusinessisbooming.InthePhilippines there is a flourishing ukay-ukay business, which now a days have gone online.
But what if clothes are no longer usable and fit to use? What are the alternatives? Some fabrics are either non-biodegradable or take years to degrade.
Their only possible destination would be sanitary landfills, alternative fuel in cement kilns or feedstock in waste-to-energy plants.
It’s good that there are studies being done to re-use or re-purpose old clothes. Some of the technologies being developed can also address the scraps or trimmings of garments factories, like ‘L and T’in Clark. One simple process to re-use waste clothing is to turn them into bricks.
An award winning company called FabBRICK, makes decorative and insulative bricks out of old clothes. Clarisse Merlet, the company’s founder, took notice of how much construction is a polluting and energy-intensive industry, so she decides to find a way to built differently , especially with the use of raw material wastes such as plastic bottles, cardboard or plastic cups. ?
Clarisse had the idea of re-using discarded clothes by making it an innovative raw material.
Based on the characteristics of the recovered textiles, she designs an ecological building material both thermal and acoustic insulator. Each brick uses the equivalent of two to three T-shirts' worth of material.
The scraps are mixed with an ecological glue that Merlet developed herself, then pressed into a brick mold. This mold uses mechanical compression to form the bricks. The wet bricks are removed from the mold and set out to dry for two weeks before using. They are fire- and moisture-resistant, and make an excellent thermal and acoustic insulator.
Another research being done on the re-use of clothing, is to turn textile tem into glucose, or sugar.
According to fiber2fashion.com, Swedish researchers have developed an environmentally friendly method to convert textile cotton into glucose, which in turn can be used to make other fabrics.
Cotton is extracted from clothes then transformed into glucose using sulfuric acid. The principle consists of decomposing the vegetable fiber of cotton (cellulose) in order to obtain smaller pieces.
The fabrics are then soaked in sulfuric acid which results in an amber-colored liquid. A standard fabric scrap represents about 5 liters of sugar solution, each of which contains the equivalent of 33 sugar cubes.
It can be used to make various types of textiles, including spandex and nylon. It could also be an alternative use could be to produce ethanol.
Isn’t that sweet?
May I invite you, dear reader, to immediately become "a quiet modern apostle" in the urgent battle for everlasting souls, including our own, as we face the "end of the world as we know it." (For emphasis: not the end of the world yet.)
A background on this invitation: Starting in the 1950'a, a Hungarian nun started to receive messages from Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Blessed Mother. However, she has remained anonymous in obedience to the instruction of her spiritual director-priest.
Some of the messages, in Hungarian,werecompiledin a publication with the proper imprimatur and nihil obstata virtual affirmation of the authenticity and Catholicity of the work. The publication was later translated into German, French, Spanish and English. The first publication in English was in 1987.
In his foreword to the English edition, writer Stephen Foglein noted that "there never was more need for apostles than in our confused and dangerous times. The Blessed Virgin has said on many occasions that the people of our time are more wicked than at the time of Noah. She has averted the