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Storm Creek reduces plastic waste, gives back to community
April 1st, 2025
Storm Creek’s showroom in Eagan, Minn., which is open twice a year to the public. Image: Storm Creek Storm Creek, an apparel brand based in Eagan, Minn., is committed to reducing plastic waste through upcycling plastic bottles into clothing items. The company sources plastic bottles from postconsumer waste that are broken down into plastic flakes, […]
Textile waste to wealth
April 1st, 2025
Recovered waste from blow room (pictured) and carding areas can be recovered and turned into usable fiber for additional profit, such as comber noil, which is regularly used as recycled fiber in open-end yarn spinning to make home textiles. Image: Dreamstime.com/© Grafoo Reducing waste lessens Earth’s environmental burden and landfill problem, but it also can […]
Bag To Life upcycles airline vests into travel accessories
January 1st, 2025
Bag To Life of Germany upcycles expired airline life vests and other materials into bags and travel accessories but also is venturing into home goods, such as chairs and BBQ apron and mitt sets. Lufthansa and United Airlines supply the company with its raw materials. The bags are manufactured in Europe. Image: Bag To Life […]
Fun-filled felt furniture made from factory remnants
March 1st, 2024
Stackabl’s Baer Collection for the Mindy Solomon Gallery was inspired by color schemes in Miami hotels built during the late 1930s. Image: Mindy Solomon/James Harris for Design Miami In an effort to repurpose industrial textile waste before it hits a landfill, the Toronto, Ont., Canada-based furniture design company Stackabl, in partnership with select New York […]
Honda workers give the shirts off their backs
December 1st, 2023
Shredded worker uniforms find a new use in vehicles as insulation. Image: Honda Honda is working toward becoming 100% carbon neutral and using only sustainable materials and clean energy by 2050—goals that require creative recycling solutions. One initiative already in practice repurposes old worker uniforms, transforming the textiles into sound-absorbing insulation used in vehicles, keeping […]
Denim waste becomes a jet plane (artwork), cabinetry
July 1st, 2023
Artist Maartin Baas wanted to make a statement about the tension between people’s desire for the “new” and the need to actually have less and use fewer resources. Though the plane is just a metaphor, the jeans cabinets, made from recycled denim board, are available for purchase. Photos: G-Star One company’s textile waste is another’s […]
Using hair to develop high-performance textiles
April 1st, 2023
Human Material Loop will move mountains if needed, but first its co-founder is going to the top of South America. Photos: Michele Fini Human Material Loop is taking its material innovations to one of the tallest mountain peaks in the world. The company is focused on the utilization of waste keratin protein fiber (hair) to […]
Airline upcycles old uniforms
November 1st, 2018
Last May, when Delta Airlines introduced new uniforms created by fashion designer Zac Posen for its 64,000 employees, the company had to decide what to do with the old clothing—more than one million pieces of uniforms adding up to 350,000 pounds. Delta found a unique way to give the old uniforms new life: it partnered […]