Sustainability
From linearity to circularity – new technologies drive sustainable innovation
With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to hamper the fiber community with restrictions on travel and public gatherings, the 59th Dornbirn Global Fiber Congress was, for the first time, held virtually. Opening the congress, Austrian Minister for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology Leonore Gewessler stressed the importance of the circular economy. She noted …
How should we handle the plastics in the environment problem?
Environmental footprints are a metric for the measurement of human demand on natural capital. This measurement attempts to consider multiple impacts of an activity rather than focusing on a single one. In the textile industry the environmental footprint considers the impacts of carbon, water, land and air from textile production. The textile industry is a …
Rice and wood – building for the future on Japan’s natural resources and fiber legacy
Many of Japan’s major corporations began as fiber manufacturers, and their expansion has been decades long, typically involving diversification into other fields such as chemicals, plastics, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, real estate, etc. Asahi Kasei, Kuraray, Teijin, Toray Industries and Toyobo, for example, all emerged as manufacturers of viscose rayon in the 1920s and have remained …
Fiber innovation follows its natural course
Fiber technology development is critical to the advancement of textile applications in the modern age for many reasons. The 20th-century ideal was to create mass production of plastic fibers that would last forever. By contrast, today’s fiber technology development places a premium on fibers that decay gracefully. The characteristics of the fiber and fabric structure …
Student Spotlight: Turning textile waste into thermal and acoustic insulation
Shafiq Islam developed a strong interest in textiles pursuing his undergraduate and master’s degrees in textile engineering in Bangladesh, while also working in the textile research and development sector. As an undergraduate, Shafiq’s main interest was technical textiles, nonwovens, and composites, and this is also the focus of his Ph.D. research at the University of …