Recycled Colour: An exploration of colour sorting strategies for the imperfect design of waste textiles

This paper explores both colour sorting strategies and design approaches for the mechanical recycling of complex coloured textile wastes intended for non-woven (air-laid-thermal bonded) commercially design products. The demand for scaling and investment in textile collection, sorting, and recycling is rising. However, while contemporary textile production demands perfection and flawlessness, when complex recycled textiles are used as input inevitably, they fall short of these demands. The research explores the issue of colour imperfection in collaboration with Danish textile company 'Kvadrat' and the recycling company 'Kvadrat Really'. It explores how Kvadrat's mixed-colour discontinued textile waste (that is ever-changing and makes uniform repeatability almost impossible) can be sorted and designed for commercial and visible applications for interior purposes. To investigate this, the research draws on visual thinking methods and colour theory, which are tested through material tinkering and hands-on experimentation. A simple colour sorting strategy was developed through the research that could be undertaken by non-designers, resulting in the purest colours possible. However, this strategy alone is not enough to provide a full solution for the use of recycled colour within products. Therefore, various design approaches were investigated, exploring the amount of recycled coloured fibres and the size and amount of recycled coloured flakes that could be used in a textile material. This paper proposes that imperfect materials, such as those that are recycled, can become a key part of the design process rather than an insurmountable obstacle and concludes that exploring the imperfect nature of our materials should be encouraged if we want to extend the lifetime of our resources.