What Is It?

Zero-waste, as its name quite straightforwardly indicates, is a method to completely use all the materials in-hand during the first phase of production, leaving nothing behind! Just imagine the process like a puzzle: you are presented with a one-piece of fabric, the challenge is to cleverly cut out all “fabric puzzle pieces” and combine them up together into one beautiful picture of a product.

It should be clear to you why we are bringing zero-waste back, it’s hella sexy (Justin Timberlake would agree). Today, with the crazy levels of producing, buying and discarding products, the amount of unused materials generated is exploding. And it’s completely unasked for! In 2014, industrial cuttings accounted for 60 billion m2 of waste, while there are over 400 billion m2 of textile cuttings per annum, meaning that 15% of the total cuttings are left unused! Zero-waste can and should be the first smart solution to our overconsumption, and earth-polluting problems.

Little Throwback

Zero-waste is not a new philosophy, and its first appearance dates back to quite a long time ago. Can you guess the first type of garment that made use of the whole piece of material? The answer is rather barbaric – we are taking you back to prehistoric times when animal skins were entirely draped around the body (yes, the animal head included, with fangs as accessories). Similar ideas can be seen in ancient Greece and Egypt where a complete length of fabric is used as a garment. Fast forwarding a few centuries, looking to the East side, we have another example: the iconic Japanese traditional kimono, entirely made of rectangular cut-out pieces (8 to be exact).

Some Applications

The good news is that the zero-waste designs are a great open-source community nowadays. Ever since designers have become more conscious about the global environmental damages, they have started to think greener, and for each zero-waste piece designed, they’d share ideas to the public so that others can join as well!

You can find, for example, designer Joe O’Neil’s overcoat that uses 100% of the fabric pattern online. Or designer Rickard Lindqvist’s famous Atacac collection here.

Another cool example is MILAN – AV JC, a small but growing community of designers from all over the world, coming together to share ideas and projects for a better zero-waste future. The foundation actively organizes workshops in fashion schools and companies to raise awareness. If you are intrigued and want to test the waters for zero-waste designs, don’t hesitate to drop by their year-round classes of 3D prototyping. As magical as Photoshop is for photos, 3D prototype simulates your design onto a “human body” (including all sewing, adjusting movements, down to the last details), in order for you to visualize the final product without actually making samples and wasting materials. It’s like playing lego and following each step to assemble your final product. Last cool feature is the development of patterns for the DIY community. All designs can be freely downloaded and used on their websites!

Now to the Animal Twist

Yes, trying to fit all the jigsaws pieces onto one fabric is tough, and we aren’t saying it isn’t impressive. But what about extending the zero-waste concept onto animal waste as well? Now that would be thinking out of the (pattern) box, get it? Bad pun aside, check out these 2 young talents we recently discovered.

Victor Alge – Interior Design from Animal Remains

Recently graduated from a degree in industrial design, the Swedish designer believed that animals should be treated with more respect, that if we were to kill them, we should do the most to use as much of their remains as possible. As such, Alge created “Alces Alces”. This creation used up the entire remains of an elk during the Sweden hunting season, from skin to bone to hair, so that nothing goes to waste. To achieve the form of a chair, the designer developed a new processing method: hard leather parchment is softened, sewn together then filled with compressed air anddd voilà! Easy on the eyes and easy on the environment. Who says that sustainable design can’t be pretty?

Jiaoni Jiao – Food Resources and Bowls from Animal Bones

“From the Bones” is Jiao’s MA brainchild from the Iceland University of Arts. It’s a beautiful conquer to find alternative ways to make use of lamb bones left wasteful in slaughterhouses. Jiao discovered that, not only can bones be used to make delicious slow-cooked soup, but once grinded to powder and mixed with alginate, it can also be molded into bowls, cups, and basically any kitchen supplies or interior decorations that we want. Best part of it all? The products can be disintegrated into nature without any harm. Talk about triple win!

So if zero-waste is such an ultimate weapon, why aren’t we using it to save the world already?

As much as we would have loved to stop global warming right now, zero-waste still has many barriers to overcome.

Geography and Industry Segmentation: More often than not, designers, pattern makers, optimizers – people with the same green initiative (minority of the world) might not be in the same place or same country. Hence, the communication needed to build products is poor and slow.

Education: Most of the fashion and design schools right now only have pattern-making and the likes taught as a course within garment-making, and not as a creative process in its own right. Therefore, pattern-makers can’t heavily-influence the final product outcome. Instead, the power is in designers’ hands, who don’t necessarily take into consideration the optimization process.

Even with difficulties, we can see that the younger generations are taking this matter into serious consideration. It’s now up to us to help develop zero-waste as the major solution to the big environmental problems. If you are interested in learning more on this subject, feel free to leave us a comment below!