The ability to use a mixture of textile waste resources and convert them into building application products.
Shows that there are endless possibilities.
So here's an example of tile that we produce that has got a combination of a couple of
different types of waste materials.
And in this instance we've got glass coupled with textiles and that just adds so much more color.
We can create and reform these new mixtures that we've created into hybrid
panels for the built environment.
It's a whole new opportunity and a whole new world that looks at transformation of textiles
in a completely different dimension.
Considered the alchemist of waste, Veena Sahajwalla has been exploring its hidden potential on
a molecular level.
Where I grew up in Mumbai, it's the industrial heartland of India. People are very creative
and they like to be able to take advantage of every bit of material and product.
We don't appreciate enough value that is embedded in our waste materials.
That's really one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about it.
I think we can do so much more and create so much more value out of waste.
As an engineer and materials scientist, she’s built a career rerouting the world’s most
problematic waste streams.
She’s invented green steel, a technique that uses shredded rubber tires to make the
iron needed for steel.
She’s also spun up an electronic waste microfactory to tackle that mountain of waste, using modular
systems to capture micromaterials from discarded cell phones.
And now, she’s turning her attention to textiles.
Because it’s gotten way too easy to buy new clothes these days.
There’s a constant flood of new items at your fingertips and it’s all part of a speed
up that’s happening in the fashion industry.
The tonnage of waste, the numbers are simply mind boggling. We're talking about many,
many millions of tons of waste materials.
Some of the world’s largest clothing manufacturers produce as many as 900 million items per year.
And so we’re buying more clothes at lower quality, using them for shorter periods of
time, and then throwing them away.
And that disposal loop is becoming a huge problem.
If you’re in the United States, roughly ten times more clothes are going into landfills today
than in the 1960s.
But Veena thinks there’s potential here, even with those discarded 7 dollar shirts.
A lot of the materials that go into manufacturing our garments are indeed synthetic materials.
So just because they don't continue their life as a garment because they've fallen
apart doesn't mean that the fundamental fibers that are there in these garments are no longer useful.
What is really fascinating is when you actually zoom in
and look at it at a deeper level
you can indeed look at it, as a collection of molecules.
That in fact presents so many different opportunities.
With that kind of thinking, Veena and her team invented a method that captures the molecular
properties from discarded items and turns them into building panels.
When our garments come to us, there's more than just the textile in our clothes.
We have, for example, zippers and buttons.
The start of the journey for us has been about removing some of these other products so that we can focus
in and look at textile itself. Then literally zoom down and break it down into those microfibrils.
Not all waste textiles deliver high level performance.
And this is why we've got to be very selective in understanding what kind of properties we
want. You know what are the different types of chemical reactions that would occur if these different
mixtures were to react with each other.
Once they’ve got the textiles sorted, they’ll incorporate recycled glass and wood into the
mix to create an optimum blend.
That then gives us the ability to use them as structural products.
And that strength can in fact be derived from waste wood and can be derived from waste glass.
So in fact, suddenly a mixture is not a bad thing for recycling and reforming.
It could well be a really, really good thing.
That then becomes, in fact, the starting point for the process,
which requires us to apply heat and pressure.
We have to have our fleece materials located inside the mold.
And that hot press really allows us to apply the heat and pressure that's required to ultimately
create the finished product.
The product then cools down, it forms into that nice integrated structure that's been
bonded together and then it's ready to be extracted out of the press and ready to be
trialed and tested.
These building materials are piloted in Veena’s microfactory, and the hope is that they’ll
be used as tiles and interior finishes in your home one day.
What we are doing of course, is going beyond the traditional three r's as people know is
reduce, reuse, recycle.
We can actually go beyond traditional recycling and think about a fourth r, that we like to
call reform, which means that we can really reform the structure, we can reform that chemistry.
No matter how many technologies we develop.
I think we have to also take some responsibility into our own hands.
we need to ask the question, do we really need so many different types of clothing items?
Do we need to really go out there and purchase the next best thing?
It's not good enough for us to think, well, just because we've thrown away our old clothes
that we've done our bit.
That's really why it's so important for us to look at our waste resources and the ability
to transform into different types of products. Looking at micro recycling ultimately has
to be governed by the principles that we are developing economies of purpose
bringing our materials back to life over and over again actually then
further promotes and develops circular economy.
And that notion of a circular economy is a major part of Veena’s mission.
Because it’s not just about making new building materials or extracting materials from cell
phones, it’s about rethinking our global supply chain altogether.
Having small and modular systems that can be fine tuned in terms of the operations is
what a microfactory is all about.
The ability to actually take locally available waste materials like textiles and waste glass
for instance, gives us a whole range of possibilities to create those local industries where you
can actually apply your creativity as well as of course engineering strengths.
What that then does is allow you to create a win-win outcome, both from an environmental
point of view as well as delivering economic benefits into the local region.
What we are really talking about here is creating those supply chains that make those resources
so valuable and so useful that really no one wants to even think about disposal.
This whole journey of circular economy will allow us to think very differently about our
waste resources and never think of them as an environmental burden.
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