A bale of jeans the size of a refrigerator, strapped and stacked against a wall in Arizona.<\/p>\n
The strap gets cut and the whole thing sags open, all indigo and worn knees.<\/p>\n
An hour later the same cotton is a blue mat about three inches thick, cut to fit between studs.<\/p>\n
It goes in a wall and it stays there, doing the job fiberglass usually does.<\/p>\n
Nothing was spun or rewoven<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The fabric was simply torn back apart<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Insulation does not really care what a material is. It cares how much still air the material can trap and hold in place.<\/p>\n Fiberglass traps air between spun glass filaments. Shredded cotton traps it between fibers that were once yarn.<\/p>\n Both end up in roughly the same performance band per inch, which is why a batt of either is about the same thickness for the same job.<\/p>\n The difference is what the fiber does when it is not insulating. Cotton burns, absorbs water and feeds mold, and glass does none of those things.<\/p>\n So the whole product hangs on a chemical step. The shredded fiber is treated with a borate solution, which carries the fire rating and the mold resistance at once.<\/p>\n Untreated, the material would be a wall full<\/strong> of dry kindling<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Collection comes first, and it is fussier than it sounds. The program that supplies the fiber wants denim that is at least 90 percent cotton.<\/p>\n Then the hardware comes off. Zippers, buttons and rivets are pulled and screened out, because metal destroys a shredder and ends up in the finished batt.<\/p>\n Shredding follows, reducing woven cloth back to loose fiber, and the borate treatment goes on at that stage rather than afterward.<\/p>\n The fiber is then formed into batts of denim insulation with a binder, at a ratio of about 80 percent recycled denim to 20 percent binder.<\/p>\n The batts are perforated down the middle so an installer can tear one in half by hand instead of cutting it.<\/p>\n The finished product needs no protective gear<\/strong>, only a dust mask<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The federal waste figures behind this story are real but old. The last full estimate put American textile generation at 17 million tons, with 11.3 million tons landfilled.<\/p>\n That estimate is for 2018, and it has not been updated since, so anyone quoting it as a current annual figure is quoting an eight year old snapshot.<\/p>\n Within it, the recycling rate for clothing and footwear specifically was 13 percent, against 14.7 percent for textiles overall.<\/p>\n The program figures are current and come from the program itself. Cumulative totals stand at more than 6 million pieces of denim, over 3,000 tons diverted and more than 12 million square feet of insulation.<\/p>\n Throughput is quoted two ways, either more than 500,000 pairs a month or about 750,000, depending on which of the partners is doing the quoting.<\/p>\n A cumulative total and a monthly rate<\/strong> are different claims<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Put the two sets of numbers side by side and the result is uncomfortable for everyone involved.<\/p>\n Roughly 3,000 tons diverted over nearly two decades sits against 11.3 million tons of textiles landfilled in a single year.<\/p>\n That is a rounding error, and it stays a rounding error even if the program triples.<\/p>\n None of which makes the product pointless. It makes it a real building material with a good story rather than a solution to textile waste.<\/p>\n The same gap shows up wherever a waste stream is bulky and cheap, as at a Phoenix plant working through worn carpet<\/a> that is mostly mineral filler.<\/p>\n The manufacturer was acquired outright in June of last year, and the buyer’s announcement<\/a> names the denim line as the point of the deal.<\/p>\n A craft recycler becoming a product line<\/strong> is the actual news<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Stretch denim is the hard limit. Most jeans sold now contain elastane, and a few percent of it is enough to disqualify a garment.<\/p>\n That is why the collection rule is written as a cotton percentage rather than as a description of a garment.<\/p>\n Separating cotton from elastane chemically is an active research field and it is not something a shredder in Arizona can do.<\/p>\n So the feedstock shrinks as the clothing industry keeps adding stretch, and the plant competes for a pool that is getting smaller and dirtier.<\/p>\n Mechanical recycling works best where the object is bulky and simply built, which is why it works on 50,000 mattresses<\/a> a day.<\/p>\n The waste and recycling rates quoted here come from the federal figures<\/a>, with the caveat about their age.<\/p>\n The batts are real, and what they cannot be is an answer<\/strong> to the closet<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A bale of jeans the size of a refrigerator, strapped and stacked against a wall in Arizona. The strap gets cut and the whole thing sags open, all indigo and worn knees. An hour later the same cotton is a blue mat about three inches thick, cut to fit between studs. It goes in a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":36400,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"americans throw out","rank_math_title":"Americans throw out about 17 million tons of textiles a year and only 13 percent of worn clothing and footwear is recycled, yet donated denim shredded at a Chandler plant returns as home insulation","rank_math_description":"Americans throw out 17 million tons of textiles a year. A plant in Chandler, Arizona strips old jeans of every rivet and button, shreds them back to cotto","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36398"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36838,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36398\/revisions\/36838"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why torn cotton works in a wall at all<\/h2>\n
What actually happens on the line<\/h2>\n
The numbers, and which ones are shaky<\/h2>\n
What the arithmetic actually shows<\/h2>\n
The part the shredder cannot fix<\/h2>\n