Innovating waste materials

The original ‘upcycler’ Luisa Cevese has been innovating with waste materials since 1999. As Head of Research for a major Italian textile company, she became aware of the amount and consistency of textile waste. This led her to consider the possibility of a design and production project using these scraps as a resource: large blocks of unusable end pieces, damaged fabric, yarns and threads, salvages, small pieces of uneven cloth and cuts from garments. Having gained some understanding of the plastics industry and technology, she started to combine textile waste with plastic of different kinds, seeing in this new material an opportunity for development which neither a textile- nor plastic-producing company could fully exploit. Different kinds of textile waste, plastic with different properties and different production facilities resulted in different finishes. Although beautiful and enduring, these materials would be problematic to recycle further due to their mixed-material construction.
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