Waste in the Textile Industry

How much waste is produced then your clothes are manufactured? And it there anything that can be done to reduce that? The Pentland Centre’s Dr Madiha Ahmad joins us to talk about her PhD research at Heriot-Watt University, in Edinburgh, which involved looking at sew-free techniques that dramatically reduce fabric wastage. Madiha tells us about textiles in her Pakistan homeland, where it is an $18bn industry, and we go in-depth on how fibres become yarn becomes fabric, spanning global supply chains and representing a more complicated process than you might imagine. We learn about the lifecycle of fibres as they become fabrics and garments; about issues of over-consumption, fast fashion, and landfill, but also how waste is created when a garment is produced; and about the many technicalities of weaving. Madiha reveals the many layers of sustainability that need to be considered, and how knowledge and practice in this area can be part of a company’s international competitiveness. We talk about fabric waste, and how this is both a natural part of the standard manufacturing process but also something that could be tackled with a different weaving method – one that will have you checking how many seams you have on your clothing. We even take the concepts of sew-free and see how similar ideas can be applied in aerospace. Plus, Jan tells us about being raised to be a farmer’s wife; Paul objects to Jan’s suggestion he doesn’t think about how and where his clothes are made as he reveals he is made in Egypt on this particular day; and the horrible idea of square scones rears its ugly head. Here is a handy outline of how textiles are manufactured: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_manufacturing If you want to understand more about weaving, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaving And if you want to listen to our previous episode on the Uzbek cotton industry, this is the place: https://pod.fo/e/3cf0a4