Potentialities of Reducing Textile Waste in the Manufacturing of Garments from Striped Fabrics

Abstract

Certain material losses are still tolerated in traditional garment manufacturing process. Only 80% of textile materials purchased by industry companies are used for their main purpose. The other 20% lost in garment cutting process are landfilled, incinerated, reused or recycled. Further technical progress is not able to minimise fabric waste significantly. Possibilities to reduce fabric waste have to be found in the garment designing and development process. Styles from cross directionally striped fabrics have raised material losses because of their specific design and fabric pattern. The 1st experiment with a striped T-shirt showed that fabric waste could be critical due to disconformities of the style design with the fabric pattern. The 2nd experiment showed that it is possible to reduce fabric waste by conforming the length of the style with the fabric pattern. Length tolerance – acceptable slight variations in the length of the style which does not change the design and visual perception of the garment style should be determined by designers and used in industry processing of manufacturing orders. The authors of the article developed methodology to perform the work process in an automated way. Certain manipulations of the design of a garment style directly in its manufacturing process have never been done before, however they could be very effective in producing medium and large manufacturing orders as they would help to reduce post-industrial fabric waste, material consumption, as well as the product cost.