Which textiles are suitable for upcycling and which are not?

Not every material can sensibly be processed further. Before you gather things together and send them off, it is worth looking at the four criteria that determine whether your stock can become a product.

What we process

Technical textiles are the simplest case: advertising banners, hoarding banners, tarpaulins, flags, Mesh and roll-ups. Tear-resistant, large in area, usually printed. The comparison of Mesh, Blockout and PVC explains how the individual fabrics differ.

With clothing, almost anything that companies take out of service works. Polo shirts, shirts, T-shirts and jerseys, sweatshirts and hoodies, trousers, blazers, softshell and technical jackets, uniforms, hi-vis vests, caps. For workwear that has been taken out of service you also have to ask whether upcycling or recycling is the better route.

On top of that there is material that we source ourselves, above all leather from textile sorting plants and lorry tarpaulins from the haulage sector.

What does not work

We do not process wood, metal or paper. That sounds obvious, but it comes up as a question regularly, because the term residual materials is often used to cover everything.

With textiles the line is blurrier. Very thin films with no woven content are too unstable for long-lasting products. Pieces that are worn through, brittle or bleached out yield no usable cut parts. Chemically contaminated material has to be checked case by case.

The four criteria

Material thickness. Hard-wearing fabrics such as PVC and Mesh suit bags and rucksacks that are used every day. Thinner material can be processed into small products in large volumes.

Area in one piece. A rucksack needs a continuous cut of about one square metre. Many small offcuts are more likely to become keyrings or cases.

Quantity. The material has to be enough for at least 250 products. How much that means depends heavily on the target product. One square metre of banner fabric makes about two tote bags, but thirty to fifty keyrings. How that converts to larger stocks is shown by the worked example for 100 square metres of banner fabric.

Condition. Soiling is not a reason for exclusion. We take care of sorting, checking and cleaning; that is an extra step, and we cost it in advance.

What happens to unsuitable material

If sorting shows that part of the stock cannot be processed, we dispose of it properly. That happens rarely, but you should know it beforehand rather than afterwards. The comparison of upcycling, recycling and downcycling shows which stage is right for which material.