Recycling/decomposing Clothes! With AI and Human Workers! Reduce non-biodegradable clothing supply!

#sustainablefashion #recycle #clothes #valueformoney #pollution #greenfashion 

Summary: Start a kiosk to collect old, used clothes. Then decide with trained AI and human workers if the cloth can be recycled or decomposed back to soil. If so remove plastic/metal materials from clothes such as buttons, zips, hooks, then recycle and sell the cloth with the recycle tag, else if material are synthetic make tents, umbrellas with it, sell it with recycled tag. If cloth is in bad state and is not recyclable dump it in landfill. Selling these new fabrics, new materials can produce some profits to run this project, to start with this project would require fundings. Further, research would be required to know what impact pure fibre based old cloth have on crumbling it in soil of kinds, which nutrient in soil increase, do colors in fabric effect soil fertility?

Enough of all this? Yes synthetic clothes look good, attractive, and vibrant but what after you have worn them, how long would they be used? Why can’t we stick to bio-degradable clothing, why to mix fabrics with synthetic materials that can’t be biodegraded or recycled? Unless one stays in minus 1-degree temperature or in freezing winds which require windcheaters, why else does one need a synthetic fabric? And I am sure with the advancements we live in; we can make people feel warm in these temperatures as well with natural fibers! 

Everyone looks for nice clean clothes to wear, something that has a tinge of colors of ones like is even more good. But, one must know the more near the clothes are to nature the better we feel. Try to wear a synthetic cloth and then wear a cotton one, we would always choose a cotton cloth while we go to sleep.

So, now there are piles of clothes that land up in landfills each year. 

What so many old and new clothes do in landfills? Rot, occupy space, and questions on what to do with this huge landfill now!

Well there are two things:

1. The natural material based old and used clothes which can be recycled or degraded to soil again, as a nice material to be churned into mud.
2. The synthetic mixed fibers used to make clothing cheaper are never dissolved back to earth’s crust. Let us reduce and subsequently stop this! 

So, let’s stop one time use clothes! Let’s use natural fiber-based clothes. It’s time to say NO to clothes made from materials that are not biodegradable. 

And second thing this article wants to present is — “How and what to do with clothes when they are used, old, or torn out”

Here is a short explanation of this big project that can solve lot of problems:

Step 1. Separate locations to dispose off old clothes, torn out, used clothes which cant be sold to a second hand cloth outlet.

Step 2. Take the clothes and dump them one by one on a roller belt to be analysed by visual AI based detector or human worker to start with. The AI based detector should be trained first based on a number and types of clothes, it may use IR or other techniques based image reading analysis and manually tagged by a AI/human expert to be of one of the following type:

1. Raw cotton
2. Synthetic material
3. Pure Silk, pure jute,…
4. Pure synthetic material

Once this is done, the cloth is then diverted to the rolling belt for that classification of cloth.

The clothes at the end of the rolling belt are collected manually to either be decomposed in soil, recycled or to be send to landfills if they have a synthetic mix in them. 

Lifecycle of the natural fiber based cloth:

With this technique, we can separate natural fibre-based clothes and synthetic fiber-based hybrid clothes. These clothes can be further analyzed for the following causes:

1. Decomposition into soil of various kinds around the world. It needs to be verified what all it adds to the soil then? This is an area of research, where we need to access the quality of soil when one decompose the old natural fiber based clothes in soil. Since the cloth was of natural origin, this should enhance if not enhance, should not depricate the land on which it was mixed it. Just the color on cloth is a problem to be analysed.
2. Recycling to raw form and to be threaded again. One must see in this case the cost that recycling would incur. In case this cost is much more than what is cost of making new cloth from new material such as cotton, wool, cashmere, silk, jute, so on then one must decompose the clothes safely in known boundaries and check for the quality of soil then. In the worse case we would need better cloth colouring agents.

All, this to say one needs to understand the following:

Step 1. Analyze the material of which the cloth is made of. Remove plastic/metal materials from clothes such as buttons, zips, hooks etc.

Step 2. In case of natural fibre, determine how old the material is ? How bad it is?

Step 3. Based on above decisions, decide to decompose the cloth/material or decide  to recycle the material to base form and to thread it again. 

Here, it is shown pictorically as below, this can be doen by human workers or with help of AI.

Yes, the clothes recycled would always be tagged as of category as recycled cloth, and the number of times it has been recycled should be visible to be read by a machine/human workers. As, the more we recycle the weeker the thread becomes unless its made strong by a hybrid-new-old threading system. If the cloth is weeker, it is recommended to be recycled in some infertile land– let it go back to where it came from soil ! Scientists to analyze the impact it have on fertility of soils of kind. Know the chemicals used on clothes can impact the soil ! It needs through analysis and experimentation, before it can be used to decompose on same land which produced the cotton or the fibre. 

The recycled clothes can also be used to make curtains, carpets, door mats, couch-covers, new woolens, quilt covers, blankets, tote bags and quilts to mention a few. 

Other materials which are hybrid with natural fibres can be recycled to make tents for need based use, raincoats, umbrellas, window covers..so on. But supply of synthetic fibres must reduce. Naturally occurring materials can be used in most of the above mentioned places, unless it is related to clinical use by doctors or scientists making a breakthrough vaccine/medicine, any other long time use and likewise uses. 

The cost of the project may be high once training of AI using kinds of rays is performed, but this would save millions of clothes worldwide to be send to landfills, when they can be recycled to threads again or to be decomposed back to soil from where they were produced (note silk is made by silk moths eating mulberry leaves).

If you are too keen still to use synthetic clothes, then please provide how you choose to recycle the materials you used which may end up in a tent, but what next after tent, in the lifecycle of the material/cloth ? 

All this to ensure that workers in the industry to be protected, well paid and kept safe. The above project may add new employment in this area of Green Clothing. This project would be needed for at least one decade to consume current stocks and techniques of synthetic materials. 

In summary, we need a kiosk where people can dump in their clothes, as per category or as it is if they are unaware of kind of cloth. From there worker of this project would send the clothes on rolling belt as described above, and collect the clothes at end of rolling belt to be send to be recycled or to be decomposed. In case of synthetic material, to be send to make tents, umbrellas, or to be send to landfills. AI can help this, and this would be an industry in itself, which would hire, train skilled and unskilled workers. Where would salary of workers would come from? By selling the recycled cloths, umbrellas, tents, and in case they claim to increase fertility of soil, they can be taken there as well, but they have synthetic clorors in it.  This is where the money would come from for this project to start! 

If the AI based solution to find the type of cloth is too costly, why cant governments make it mandatory to mention the type of cloth in ready made clothes sold made henceforth, so that human worker can separate the pure natural clothes from synthetic clothes ? Wont this be easier ? 

So the talk continues soon..

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