I recently had an opportunity to collaborate with Gem City Apron, a Dayton based startup, on developing a sustainable apron using upcycled denim.

Some of you might be familiar with the term Upcycle, but those who aren’t, it is a creative reuse of existing materials from preloved objects. A sustainable method of product making, as it keeps usable textiles from entering the landfills while reducing the strain of demand on our natural resources.

Over the past five years, I’ve been working as an environmental designer, seeking to only use low impact materials for product design. Over the past ten years, I worked as a multidisciplinary designer in NYC. My goal is to help extend the life of functional clothing; thus, only upcycling garments no longer in demand. In this post, I’ll be sharing six helpful steps and insights to bringing your ideas to market, sustainably.

1) Research and finding your inspirations

Thorough research on your target market, trends, demand, and competition should happen before you start any design or purchasing of materials. Google trend is an excellent tool to assist with some of your research, as rich data from Google’s keyword searches are presented based on popularity by periods and regions.

Once your analysis is complete, the gathering of inspirations can help guide your design and style further, whether it’s minimal, funky, or traditional. You can organize all your inspirational images into a single layout typically known as a Moodboard. Here are some tools that can help with that Adobe Sparks, niice, but my goto app is Pinterest, its free, as it’s easy to discover and organize your inspirations efficiently. You can also use Pinterest as a marketing tool to launch your finished product!

2) Define and Design

Identifying your requirements by knowing the intended use and the ideal customer will help you create meaningful outcomes for your target market.

Gem City Apron has plans to sell to local coffee shops with an add-on opportunity for brand customization; since servers will wear these aprons, bigger pockets were needed to store devices, menus, and personal items.

When defining your design aesthetics and style, you should reference your moodboard often to align with design consistency. For this apron, the desired outcome is a minimal design as fewer seams are required to keep production costs down and to give clearance for branded customization. Upcycled products usually require some patchwork to create the textiles.

The final design of the prototype is made up of three horizontal panels with exposed seams showing a hint of pop color. The odd number of panels gives the design visual interest while maintaining a beautifully minimal design; the centered pocket adds a sense of balance within the overall apron. A simple way to produce variants is to use high contrast color serging threads with the different denim washes from light to dark.

3) Finding the Right Denim Material.

Denim has always been a cotton warp-faced textile ever since its inception; the addition of spandex, elastane, and polyester was introduced in the ’80s to give way for new body-hugging silhouettes. A rule of thumb, you always want to use the same tensile strength fabrics within a single garment. Mixing stretch with non-stretch materials will not yield good results.

For this apron, there wasn’t a need to use stretched materials and women’s jeans contain too many variations of mixed fibers that would require more work to source 100% cotton jeans thus eliminating them from our choice.

An excellent way to find what you are looking for is to thrift for yourself, based on my experience, I have noticed some stores with an unusually large selection of men’s cotton jeans size 40 +. Rarely will you find men’s skinny jeans in those sizes, so the team selected them to make the prototype as we hypothesized there wasn’t much demand for larger size men’s jeans.

The challenge with upcycling is the limited workable area within a garment, as shown in the above diagram. Your final design can help determine the usable space for making your upcycled product. Depending on your project, style, and aesthetic, it is possible to use the entire pair of jeans without producing any waste. Proper planning and imagination can help too.

4) Prototyping

The approach for making this prototype is to use one pair of jeans per apron, so the size of the apron panels needed to fit inside 10" leg panels, with enough materials left for facings and other details. As a first step, wash and prepare the jeans to be dissected, cutting as close to the serged side seams as possible until the usable area separates from the rest of the jeans. You can employ various methods of dissecting a garment based on your needs and design. Reversing the denim to use the back side as the front gave the apron a fresher look. The inside of the jeans always appears to be cleaner and resembling new materials.

The denim leg seams don’t often get used as they are bulky and hard to sew with typical home machines. Since these aprons have ties, I experimented with using the seams as the apron ties since I have saved a bag full of leg seams. The exposed seams aesthetic pair nicely with the exposed seams of the apron body. Using the jean seams increase the percentage of upcycled material in this apron closer to 95%.

5) Sourcing + Production: A collaborative effort

Sourcing usually requires a lot of time, mainly searching for preloved garments in bulk. Luckily there are more and more startups specializing in textile and clothing rescue. The ladies from Gem City Apron approached Helpsy to inquire about large men’s jeans. Little did we know, the fantastic team from Helpsy said they were excited about finding buyers for their big sized jeans and were excited to start this partnership.

Production of the aprons was done at Sew Valley in Cincinnati as they did a fantastic job with each apron. When finding the right manufacturers, you should always ask the right types of questions and make sure their sustainable practices are in line with your mission.

6) What to do with textile scraps?

Upcycling isn’t perfect as it does yield some waste. Luckily many startups are accepting fabric scrap as donations — as they turned into home insulation. All scraps from this prototype brought to Goodwill textile recycling program.

The ladies at Gem City Apron donated their production scraps to Cotton Inc’s Blue Jean Go Green program; they provide many ways to donating your denim. I was also a lucky recipient of all the back pockets for my next upcycling project!

There are many ways to disposing of textile waste, as more local businesses are offering recycling programs, always check your local thrift store for assistance or better yet search for “textile recycling programs.”

About Hand Wash Only Co.

Edvin Lee is an environmental designer using design to combat climate change. He’s the founder of Hand Wash Only Co., a sustainable design studio with a mission to remix the world and provide earth-friendly products and services. Through his sustainable practice, he hopes to preserve Earth’s beauty for generations to come.

Hand Wash Only specializes in assisting startups in launching + Products as we have over ten years of experience collaborating with startups and big brands with website design, branding, marketing, and product development.

Summer is upon us, and more people will be participating in indoor and outdoor sports. Did you know that most sportswear, made from synthetics, microfiber, fleeces or polyester will shed in the washing machine, releasing small particles of plastic into the water system and eventually into our rivers and oceans. These are known as Micro-plastics!

Microplastics are small pieces of plastic that pollute the environment. They come in all sizes the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) classifies microplastics as less than 5 mm in diameter. Two classifications of microplastics currently exist: primary microplastics are manufactured and are a direct result of human material and product use, and secondary microplastics, derived from the breakdown of larger plastic debris like the macroscopic parts that make up the bulk of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Both types are recognized to persist in the environment at high levels, particularly in aquatic and marine ecosystems. Plastic pellets created for use by manufacturers are sometimes referred to as nurdles.

9 ways to reduce micro-plastics pollution:

9. Watch The Story of Stuff’s microfiber movie to learn about the issue.

8. Gently hand wash or soak your workout clothes and hang dry whenever possible. (Hand washing and hang drying clothes will help your garment last longer.)

7. Fill up your washing machine. Washing a full load results in less friction between the clothes and fewer fibers released. (let all your clothes dry thoroughly before putting into the hamper. Mildew and bacteria makes clothing smell bad)

6. Use a colder wash setting. Higher temperature can damage clothes and release more fibers.

4. When you clean out your dryer, save lint instead of washing it down the drain. (Here are some creative ideas for using laundry lint)

3. Guppy Friend wash bag. In tests, the bag captured 99 percent of fibers released in the washing process. The bags are available at Patagonia for $20–30.

2. Purchase a washing machine lint filter. These filters require more of an investment, but they will benefit your septic system and the environment. Check out this one or this one.

1. Buy clothes made from natural fibers such as organic cotton, linen, and hemp. Natural fibers will eventually break down in the environment.

I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, but if you are still reading, then that’s a sign you do care about the world and its inhabitants. I want to use my energy to help inspire and educate people on some recycling facts to eliminate single-use plastics and to upcycle as much as possible.

Refuse

Refusing to consume plastics is the safest way to reduce plastics. Many zero waste practitioners have cut their yearly waste into one small mason jar.

Learning about the symbols

If you are not 100% zero waste and do consume products in plastic containers, you should learn how to recycle, knowing what can be recycled and cleaning out containers thoroughly.

Recycling tips

Prepare plastic containers for recycling by ensuring first that they are either:

#1 (PETE): soda-pop bottles, cooking oil bottles and peanut-butter jars
#2 (HDPF): milk, water and juice bottles, bleach and detergent bottles, margarine tubs and some grocery sacks
#3 (PVC): window cleaner bottles, cooking-oil containers, and detergent powder containers
#4 (LDPE): food packaging, shrink-wrap, carryout bags and heavy-duty bags
#5 (PP): butter and margarine tubs, yogurt containers, screw-on caps and drinking straws
#6 (PS): often incorrectly referred to as Foam cups or packing materials, a Dow Chemical brand trademark, the category includes cutlery and plates, foam coffee cups, egg cartons, meat trays and yogurt containers
#7 (Other): squeezable syrup and condiment bottles and some microwave food trays

These identification codes are often on the bottom of the plastic container encircled by three chasing arrows.

It is essential to remove plastic tops from the plastic containers and rinse containers with water.

Crushing containers will help save space while storing them.

What not to recycle

Around the holidays, broken strands of Christmas lights, another choking hazard for the sorting line. And all day every day there are plastic shopping bags (recyclable at a grocery store but not from a household), chunks of styrofoam, diapers, syringes, food-contaminated containers … a nearly endless litany of things that residents throw into their curbside recycling carts figuring they are or ought to be recyclable. One worker grabs the remnants of a screen door off the sorting line while another snags a wire rack from a DIY shelving unit.

What to recycle look below or check Recycleoftenrecycleright.com

Contamination in recycling

Non-recyclable content that makes its way to recycling centers is called contamination, and as more packaging and products are made with mixed materials, confusion grows among consumers and costs for municipalities escalates. The recycling facility often dictates what can be recycled and some have stringent guidelines. China recently changed the rate of contaminating by only accepting plastics with less than .5% contamination. Black plastic, for example, cannot be properly identified and sorted at many local plants. It is estimated that up to a fifth of our recycling contains contaminants, as 200,000 tons were incinerated or dumped in the landfill last year, official figures show.

“[A black plastic coffee cup lid] looks like recycling, feels like recycling, it’s marked as recycling,” Jim McKay, general manager of waste management services for the City of Toronto, told CBC News. “[In Toronto,] It’s not.”

The city could pay an extra $5 million charge if its average contamination rate reaches 27%. McKay estimated that each percentage point decrease in contamination could lower recycling costs in Toronto by $600,000 to $1 million per year.

Reduce, reuse and recycle

As a person trying to transition towards a zero waste lifestyle, I’m a champion for upcycling waste, since starting my circular economy course on Edx. I have a subtler appreciation for upcycling materials, and in my upcoming post, I’ll be showing a few DIY projects using eco-friendly and low impact materials as I’ve found a lot of DIYers are not doing that.

Comment below if you agree or disagree, let’s chat about the environment.

China produces most of the garments and, about 70 percent of the rivers and lakes contaminated by the 2.5 billion gallons of wastewater produced by the textile industry.

The film RiverBlue examines the destruction of rivers in Asia caused by the largely unregulated textile industry. It also connects today’s consumer appetite for fast fashion as a cause of this environmental degradation and explores how manufacturing innovation could help solve this global problem.

Fabric dyes not only affect the environment but also can cause health issues when exposed to them.

Reactive dyes

Reactive dyes commonly used in the dyeing of cellulose fibers, like cotton or flax, and wool. Tie-Dye, Tub or washing machine Dyeing (solid color), Low Immersion Dyeing, Batik, Dye Painting, Silk Painting, Screen & Block Printing, or Stenciling, even Tie-dyeing Silk in a Microwave.

Although there is not much health risk with consumers wearing reactive dyed clothing, they can cause problems with plant workers who handle the dyes in the process as the powdered form will have respiratory effects if inhaled.

Disperse dyes

Disperse dyes are the only water-insoluble dyes that dye polyester and acetate fibers. Their molecules are the smallest dye molecules among all dyes.

Certain disperse dyes w in causing allergic reactions, particularly when they used for skintight, close-fitting clothes made from synthetic fibers. Disperse dyes, showing low perspiration fastness, are responsible for this effect. Polyester dyed with disperse dyes does not pose a problem since the perspiration fastness is high. However, problems can arise with polyamide or acetate rayon dyed with disperse dyes since the low perspiration fastness allows the dyes to migrate to the skin.

Toxic Heavy Metals

Some natural and synthetic dyes require the use of heavy metals to help bond dyes to the fibers. They are defined by their adverse effects on people’s health, for example, chrome, copper, and zinc are known carcinogens, yet widely used in the production of synthetic dyes. These chemicals found in the synthetic dyes used for all the spring fashions.

Summary

Education and learning about the products we purchase and consume is key to reducing environmental and health impact. Natural plant-based dyes have been used for thousands of years, but alas, they are not all safe as some plants are toxic to humans or animals. Still, there are a lot of alternatives and ways to use natural dyes with no environmental impact.

The following are more resources that can further shed light on this.

You can further investigate dyes and health concerns here.

Here are some resources to see textile dye’s environmental and health concerns:

Health and Environmental Hazards of Synthetic Dyes By: Prof. R. B. Chavan

DYES AND THEIR EFFECTS ON YOUR HEALTH

Environment-friendly dyeing processes for cotton by R B Chavan

Health and Safety Executive: Safety Topics of Dyes and Dyeing

Are Natural Dyes Safer than Synthetics? From All about Hand Dyeing.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in 2014, more than 38 million tons of food waste was generated, with only 5.1 percent diverted from landfills and incinerators for composting. (FYI: Organic matter does not compost in landfills, leaving rotten food and foul odors behind). About 1.3 billion tons of global food produced every year is wasted or lost, that would be enough to feed all the hungry mouths and yet its still a big problem.

Why?

Here are some reasons we have food waste; unharvested crops that don’t leave the farm is called unmarketable, oversupply, surplus, culls, seconds, trash, or sometimes, ugly. As it turns out, a significant amount of healthy, nutrient-dense fruit and vegetables is left unharvested in farmer’s fields, never reaching the food supply. When produce reaches markets the ‘ugly’ produce often end up in the garbage. Restaurants usually prepare more food than they sell. And staled foods are pulled off the shelves.

To reduce the food heading to landfills, food companies, grocery stores, and restaurants will have to take some responsibility. And many are. But many of us are not.

Advocacy and educators

“Forty to 50 percent of food waste comes from consumers and 50 to 60 percent from businesses,” says the EPA’s Ashley Zanolli. She helped create a program to teach consumers to be more efficient in the kitchen. It’s called Food: Too Good to Waste. You can participate in their KEEP GOOD FOOD FROM GOING TO WASTE challenge now! It’s a smart way to plan and stay organized in your kitchen. As well as learning how to store produces and fresh foods to last longer. Of course, canning or pickling are ways to save your surplus produce.

The Greatist has compiled a list of ideas to help with food waste problem in the home. The take away is to plan smart, be realistic and buy what you need or have time to make. Rotating your food so that leftovers are front and center will help you stay on top of your food inventory. Always eat leftovers and compost whatever you can’t consume! At the end of the day, if you are throwing food away, it means you need to rethink your grocery habits.

Rob Greenfield is an adventurer, environmental activist, humanitarian, making a difference. He’s the creator of The Food Waste Fiasco, a campaign that strives to end food waste. His mission is to lead the way to a more sustainable world and has rescued food from over two thousand dumpsters across the United States.

Trash is for Tossers creator Lauren Singer, who’s been living a zero-waste lifestyle since 2012, recently opened a Package Free Shop in Brooklyn New York. Her blog demonstrates how to reduce waste in the home and is simple, cost-effective, timely, fun, & entirely possible for everyone and anyone.

Zero waste and package free shops are growing in popularity especially across Europe. In Feb, a Grocery store in the Netherlands launched a plastic-free isle, mostly addressing the growing plastic waste issue.

Interesting food wastes start-ups:

Rise Products — gives a second life to many of those waste materials and transform them into new products and ingredients. They have created nutritious ingredients such as flour from upcycled organic byproducts. Very excited to see what they do next.

Mintscraps — Utilizes technology to empower restaurants and food service businesses to track and monitor food waste with the goal of reducing wasteful output and landfill disposal. By implementing new waste management solutions, restaurants and food service businesses can have a better understanding of their waste, uncover cost savings, and support sustainability initiatives.

412FoodRescue — Partners with food retailers, nonprofit organizations, and #FoodRescueHeroes to bring healthy food directly to those experiencing food insecurity.

Zero-waste Restaurants

More and more restaurants are doing their part to reduce food wastes, you can find some located in NYC and London here.

Italian chef Massimo Bottura opened his sixth Refettorio community kitchen in Paris. The concept is to provide a sumptuous feast to the most vulnerable of Paris while also battling food waste. Food conceived the idea of Refettorio Paris for Soul, a non-profit organization founded by chef Massimo Bottura and Lara Gilmore to empower communities to fight against food waste through social inclusion.

Finding your own path to sustainability.

There are a lot of ways we can solve the food waste. It takes a community, a country of people working together to combat this growing problem. As a young boy growing up, I was always taught to eat every grain of rice in my bowl as there are many less fortunate people cannot afford food. That has always been part of my life and personal philosophy.

In my perspective, the technology could be used for good but have often created more problems. I’d love to explore traditional ways of using food scraps before composting, increasing the value of our once abundant resources. As I believe that we should fully utilize our resources and reap the benefits nature has provided us.

Join a sustainable revolution. Be an advocate and reduce waste together! Please comment on your food waste saving ideas!