Imagine you can dissolve the seams of your textile items! Let’s say your customer spilled tomato juice on the sleeve of the white blouse you designed, with Wear2 you can reuse all the other parts of the blouse to make a new garment. As a designer you can create mix and match garments!
This is a technique that definitely belongs in the list of eco-effective possibilities. It is called Wear2 ecostitching technology and it creates the possibility to remove seams from a textile item very easily.
A few possibilities:
How does it work?
When you start designing think about design for disassembly. Which parts of your item do you want to reuse or remove? Those can be stitched with the Wear2 yarn. For example a pocket with a company logo on it.
When the item comes back after use it will be placed in a box with other items that are stitched with the Wear2 yarn.
This box with textile items goes into a big microwave oven. The yarn loses about 80% of its tensile strength when exposed to microwave radiation. The textiles stay unharmed. When the textile items are treated pulling lightly on the seam causes the yarn to break, which then allows components to be easily separated.
Now it is possible for a designer to choose upfront which pieces of the product they would like to disassemble in the future.
Technical features
The yarn is developed for industrial applications and sowing machines. However, as the yarn is designed to be used without requiring any mechanical alternation or major setting changes, it should also be suitable for normal sowing machines.
The yarn:
Can be used in either single stitch or locking stitch.
What would you design if you could use the Wear2 technology?
A few possibilities:
- You are able to remove all the yarn, replace one part and restitch the rest of the item again.
- You can reuse parts of a product that are still useful.
- You can easily remove company labels and add new ones.
- When a textile item is worn-off Wear2 disassembles the item and the pure fibre can be recovered to make new yarn. (Currently you have the problem of cotton shirts stitched with polyester yarn which mixes the biological and technological cycle)
- Working with Wear2 also means that it is easy to remove buttons, zippers, Velcro tape etc. from an item prior to recycling of the fibre.
How does it work?
When you start designing think about design for disassembly. Which parts of your item do you want to reuse or remove? Those can be stitched with the Wear2 yarn. For example a pocket with a company logo on it.
When the item comes back after use it will be placed in a box with other items that are stitched with the Wear2 yarn.
This box with textile items goes into a big microwave oven. The yarn loses about 80% of its tensile strength when exposed to microwave radiation. The textiles stay unharmed. When the textile items are treated pulling lightly on the seam causes the yarn to break, which then allows components to be easily separated.
Now it is possible for a designer to choose upfront which pieces of the product they would like to disassemble in the future.
Technical features
The yarn is developed for industrial applications and sowing machines. However, as the yarn is designed to be used without requiring any mechanical alternation or major setting changes, it should also be suitable for normal sowing machines.
The yarn:
Can be used in either single stitch or locking stitch.
- Looks like a normal seam
- Behaves like a normal seam
- Is as strong as a normal seam
- Is available in a range of colours and decitex
- Leaves no trace on the textile when removed
- Enables complete disassembly of the textile product
- Rebranding and reuse possible
- Recover of pure fibre possible
What would you design if you could use the Wear2 technology?
The yarn provided by Madeira is a 120 core spun polyester/nylon thread of 310 Dtex and 280 Td. It has an electrically conductive polymer-metal composite core within a polyester outer sheath. The yarn is covered with a patented application that makes it receptive to microwave energy.
The yarn is not yet for sale on the open market. A company who wants to use it will need to agree a licence to use the technology because the process is patented. Part of the licence is a machine to process the Wear2 material and this machine can be developed in a range of scales depending on the users requirements.
Wear2 is developed in the 9-partner collaborative R&D project SUSCORP. The three partners NIRI, C-Tech Innovation Ltd and Madeira UK Ltd collectively provide an integrated solution including yarn supply, microwave equipment supply, IP licensing and know-how.
http://www.wear2.com/
The yarn is not yet for sale on the open market. A company who wants to use it will need to agree a licence to use the technology because the process is patented. Part of the licence is a machine to process the Wear2 material and this machine can be developed in a range of scales depending on the users requirements.
Wear2 is developed in the 9-partner collaborative R&D project SUSCORP. The three partners NIRI, C-Tech Innovation Ltd and Madeira UK Ltd collectively provide an integrated solution including yarn supply, microwave equipment supply, IP licensing and know-how.
http://www.wear2.com/