New materials from the Trash-2-Cash project to be shown for the first time at Dutch Design Week 2018

Six brand new material prototypes comprised of new, recycled and recyclable apparel and automotive materials and concepts will be showed in Eindhoven, from 20 to 28 October.

As we all know, one resource that’s becoming more abundant is waste. The idea of recycling textile waste has been popular for decades, but current mechanical methods give poor quality fabrics suitable only for industrial applications, like insulation, and the upcycling of pre-consumer textile waste into products is impossible to scale. Trash-2-Cash (T2C) proposes a new model where textile waste is regenerated chemically – resulting in new plastics and textiles that are the same quality as new materials, to make products that are industrially replicable and infinitely recyclable.

Trash-2-Cash is a consortium of designers, scientists and industry partners who have been working together to make new high-end materials from waste textiles. The consortium includes 18 partners from 10 countries that have been collaborating the last three years to produce these new materials from textile waste and have shared a new way of working – Design-Driven Material Innovation (DDMI) – outlining how science, design and industry can input into the process from beginning to end.

The resulting material prototypes developed during the project and the 6 Master Case ‘stories’ these new materials have been specifically developed for will be exhibited for the very first time during Dutch Design Week 2018, a key date in the design industry calendar.