fastener

In 2025, the consumption of fast fashion will reach a new high. Young people in metropolitan areas in particular are jumping on the bandwagon of rapidly changing trends. Compared to the year 2000, clothing sales have doubled. Today, the average person in Germany buys around 60 items of clothing per year. Cheap fashion is only worn an average of 1.7 times before it is discarded. According to Greenpeace, around 40 percent of the clothes purchased are not even worn once. This results in around 1.3 million tons of textile waste every year, of which only around one percent is recycled.
Even if a complete switch to slow fashion would be ideal, the cultural significance of fast fashion is likely to remain so pervasive that it will never disappear completely. The search for sustainable alternatives leads to more environmentally friendly materials that are easier and quicker to recycle and do not release microplastics. In our case, the focus is on the paper industry.
Our concept is based on the scientific paper “Fast-Forward: Proposals for a Light and Restorative Fashion Alternative” by Kate Goldsworthy and Kay Politowicz. This project presents three different sustainable and recyclable shirts with a specifically defined lifespan, two of which are based on paper.
The garments presented do not use classic fastening systems, as these are usually made of plastic or metal these days. This is precisely where we come in: fast:ener attempts to supplement the existing concepts of fast (cycling) fashion with sustainable fastening systems.
The material used is paper fibers that are too short to be recycled into paper textiles. These are produced in a fiber sludge during the manufacture of paper. From a conversation with those responsible at Papierrecycling GmbH & Co. KG Julius Schulte Trebsen,

we learned that this company alone produces 2,000 tons of fibre sludge every year. After dewatering and cleaning, we assume that around 500 tons of material can be reused for our purposes. This is pureed in order to be filled more evenly into press molds. The molds run for two days on a 2 km long conveyor belt (divided into six helixes) and are inoculated alternately with a bacterial solution of Sporosarcina pasteurii and an activation solution containing urea every four hours. The biomineralization process initiated in this way makes the buttons stable and water-repellent. Based on these dimensions, 500,000 buttons could be produced daily.
At the end of its useful life, the garment, including the fasteners, can be disposed of in waste paper and simply recycled. Recycling only requires a further intermediate step, in which the compounds resulting from biomineralization are dissolved with citric acid.
The clothing is deliberately not washed during the short period of use. On the one hand, because neither the textile nor the buttons are machine washable, and on the other hand, to save the energy and water required for the wash cycle. In order to meet the fast-changing requirements of the fast fashion industry, we dyed buttons with different food colors and tried to simulate a wide range of variations through shape studies. We also tested different fastening methods. Some of these allow consumers to attach the buttons themselves using a tab system and offer the option of completing a chosen item of clothing with their own choice of buttons.
fast:ener offers a variety of shapes and colors of stable, weatherproof buttons made from a waste product that can be recycled to save energy. This approach therefore adds another important aspect to sustainable fast fashion.