Mary Ruppert-Stroescu, an associate professor and fashion design area coordinator at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, has developed a patented textile upcycling process. Mary looked at the cotton fabrics from raw material (cotton bales) to end products. Cotton fabric is natural, renewable, biodegradable, and, at least theoretically, sustainable. However, producing that fabric requires significant energy and resources. Seeds are planted, cultivated, and harvested. Cotton bales are shipped to factories, spun into yarns, and woven or knit into bolts of fabric. Cloth is colored, cut, and sewn to create finished garments.
Mary said roughly 15% of cloth intended for apparel winds up as scrap on the cutting room floor. Moreover, though an estimated 95% of retail clothing is recyclable, the vast majority ends up in landfills — more than 20 billion pounds annually in the United States alone. To reduce this ever-growing waste, Ruppert-Stroescu has led the development of RECLEM, a patented process designed to help clothing manufacturers create new apparel from recycled fabric.
In developing RECLEM, Ruppert-Stroescu realized that the key to economic viability was how the process could enable scalability in both design and manufacturing. When cutting fabric, designers typically try to minimize waste by tailoring components to the dimensions of the bolt. Ruppert-Stroescu likens it to the video game Tetris. However, those calculations differ for every size at which a garment is produced, and the direction of the fabric grain often constrains layouts. Because Ruppert-Stroescu’s process involves shaping fabric rather than cutting it, grain can be customized, and patterns can easily be scaled up or down.
In addition, the RECLEM system primarily maps onto existing commercial machinery and could be seamlessly integrated into large-scale production, Ruppert-Stroescu says. She also notes that, compared to creating new cloth, RECLEM dramatically lowers material costs while losing tensile strength, wrinkle recovery, water repellency, or abrasion resistance. The core challenge, she explains, is essentially cultural.
