What do you get when a musician and a textile company get together? It looks like what you get is a plan to bring recycled fabric into the mainstream!
Music producer, singer-songwriter, and rapper Pharrell Williams is teaming up with the New York-based textile firm Bionic Yarn to work on a new fabric made from recycled plastic. Williams started out as a hip hop artist, writing lyrics for folks like Wreckx-N-Effects and going on to produce albums and release his own music. He’s had his own fashion lines before, co-founding Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream Footwear. Now, he’s planning to make upcycled fabric a viable option for clothing makers!
Exciting, right? Here’s what Williams has to say:
So what is the technology behind Bionic Yarn? The website lays it out in pretty simplistic terms. I do wonder about a couple of things. They chop up plastic bottles and “extrude” the flakes into fibers. I’d like to know a bit more about what’s involved in the extruding. Does it involve a lot of harsh chemicals like turning bamboo fibers into fabric?
The extruding process creates “staple fibers” that they weave with “high tenacity polyester.” They don’t say where the polyester comes from, but that is normally a petroleum product, so I’ve got some questions there, as well. Once they’ve got the fibers, they can spin it into yarn or weave it into fabric.
So what do you guys think? I’m all for widespread use of recycled fabric, and Bionic Yarn seems to be keeping its process pretty transparent, which you’ve got to respect. Still, there are a couple of points in the process that give me pause. What about you?
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Image Credit: Creative Commons photo by kristinb
