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Fashion Fascia

Can textile waste be incorporated into future car production?

By law, cars of the future will be increasingly required to use recycled and recyclable materials in their production. Becky Earley worked with design ideas for the Trash-2-Cash recycling technologies to propose three new modes for manufacturing appealing, high-quality automotive interior plastics using recycled plastic pellets, recycled textiles and recyclable resin.

The prototype work by Becky followed an aesthetic route in order to create a decorative ‘skin’ layer to adhere to a recycled plastic car part. It also used the recycled polyester materials from the project. These mixed cotton and polyester textiles were collected by Soex in Germany, and then separated and made in to non-woven, melt-blown polyester sheets by Swerea IVF in Sweden (RISE). The work aimed to create decorative finishes through print design for this soft material, and to then create a reinforced plastic composite material with it with Cidetec in Spain. Becky developed the new materials through several creative processes – steered by the project workshops and feedback from partners - before arriving at the final prototypes shown at Dutch Design Week in October 2018.

A hand holding a small fabric sample Fashion Fascia Sample