Broken Butterfly Wings: Exploring the Role of Textile Blends in the Circular Economy for Recycling and Disassembly

In the context of a transition to a more sustainable fashion and textile industry, blended textiles (materials where two or more different resources are combined) are a major issue. These are described as “monstrous hybrids” and used to create “Frankenstein products” that are difficult to recover and recycle. The circular economy champions mono-materiality. It asks that technical and biological materials are kept in separate cycles, as shown in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s “butterfly model”; named because of its two wing-like sides. But in reality, materials are mixed in most of the textiles that surround us, and fully mono-material design is unrealistic in many cases. The butterfly wings are broken. This paper explores the various ways textile designers make blended textiles and acknowledges their role and creativity when providing solutions for aesthetic and technical requirements. The study draws on the first two authors’ PhD practice research that explored these issues from complementary re-active and pro-active approaches. Both carried out at the University of the Arts London, one project investigated Textile Design for Disassembly and the other Design for Recycling Knitwear. Using an after-action review approach, joint insights from both projects are presented. The paper investigates blending across three themes: hierarchy, technique and fibre type. It focuses on why these themes are relevant to designers and explores their different levels of complexity, before demonstrating how multiple perspectives are necessary to address the complex and systemic issues tied to blend recyclability. The paper concludes that blending and recovery are not mutually exclusive and that blended textiles can, with forethought, form part of the circular economy.