Silk Recycling into Non-Woven Fabric for Garment Coat Application

The present project aims to develop a custom opening process to handle silk fabric's light weight, fine and high-twist characteristic to recover the silk fibres, and subsequently feed these fibres into non-woven process to create fabric for coat-garment purpose directly without going through the traditional process of yarn spinning, knitting or weaving into fabrics. To attain suitable strength for coat-garment making, a sandwich structure with a silk-mesh skeleton between two layers of non-woven silk fabric is proposed.

Silk is renowned for its hand feel, fineness, light weight, and with high-twist yarn, where conventional yarn and fibre opening process in textile recycling is unable to deal with efficiently. Traditional manufacturing of silk garment product also generates off-cuts which, currently without a reliable method of recycling and reuse, is wasteful in terms of material, as well as energy spent in production. It is expected that the success of this project can facilitate recycling these valuable protein fibres.