Case Study Title
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[Name of client, what they do & their location: Give your reader context and write a quick sentence about what this project or product is all about. This will show your experience and interest in specific types of clients or design work. Naming the location will also help if you want to make it clear you work with clients all over, as opposed to just your hometown.
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FARM TO TABLE CLOTHING
Making your favorite pair of jeans likely used about 2,000 gallons of water. They were processed abroad with harsh chemicals and unsavory labor conditions before they reached your closet. The average American woman owns seven pairs of jeans. Our solution to America’s denim obsession is grown here at home—corn. 250 million tons of corn waste piles up in the US each year, in the form of corn husks.
Our sustainable denim is made from chemically retted corn husk fibers, microbially dyed, and relaxed with enzymes. denimaize is reweaving the future of denim.
Redesigning Corn Disease
Our fabric uses husks "diseased" with Corn Smut, a fungal infection. By weaving so-called healthy and diseased husks together in one functional fabric, we hope to question what is considered waste. When Corn Smut infects a corn plant, kernels grow bulbous and discolored. These infected crops are often destroyed on the farm, even though the infected galls are safe, and even edible. In Mexico, smut has been valued for millennia as the delicacy, huitlacoche. Though eating huitlacoche hasn't caught on in the States, we hope our denim will recast corn smut as a useful bioresource, not waste.
PROBLEM-CENTERED DESIGN
Water Waste. Jeans are mostly made of cotton, a highly water-intensive crop. Relaxing jeans often requires repetitive washes. Stretch jeans, blended with elastane or rayon, release plastic residue into water.
Chemical Coloring. Indigo and synthetic dyes are toxic, and pollute aquatic life. Denim is also faded with sandblasting, which creates small particles that cause respiratory illness.
Long Supply Chains. Most jeans are made in countries with fewer labor restrictions. The lengthy transport from factory to American stores lowers producer costs at the expense of energy consumption.
“In some areas of China, you can tell which colors are fashionable in New York and Paris by the color of the rivers”
OUR PROCESS
1. Thread Production
To facilitate the separation of the cellulose fibers from the husk, in a process called retting, we soak dried corn husk in a solution of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) and piping hot water. The chemical solution breaks down the organic material in the husk and leaves us with fiber clumps. The fibers are then rinsed with water, neutralized with 20% acetic acid, and finally left to dry.
Once the fibers are separated from the husk, they can then be spun into threads, using a hand loom. We iterated through different mixtures with common materials, and we decided to use a flax blend to help the feel of the material.
Our next step is to continue to research alternative materials that may balance out the characteristics of ours in a blend so we can reach a truly industrial quality material.
2. Microbial Dyeing
We chose a range of bacteria that were both natural and genetically engineered to create diverse colors from light pink to dark violet and included the stereotypical navy and were even bioluminescent.
We used bacterial dye not only to create a substitute of the traditional chemical dye but also to explore the possibility of wearing other colors beyond what the microbial market has right now.
The process mitigates two existing problems of the traditional denim-making process: non-biodegradable chemical coloring and excessive water consumption. It also ties back to the “rethinking disease” motif – bacteria are generally seen as “gross,” but we are demonstrating how bacteria can provide value.
3. Biological Post-Processing
With all the water used in denim and cotton production, and to make the post processing biologically cohesive, we used biostoning to soften our textile. Biostoning is method of using cellulases to thin and post process the fabric. Cellulases are a group of enzymes that breaks down plant fibers, requiring significantly less water in post-processing. than traditional softening acids, pumice or other bleaching agents.
Since enzymes can be recycled compared to the alternatives dumped after use, they can save the majority of water as samples do not need to get replaced. Productivity increases by 30-50% (depending on who you ask) as small doses of enzymes can replace dozens of pounds of pumice.
Pumice dust also poses a danger to employees and leftover fragments take time to remove. The most common post processing bleaching agents can cause permanent respiratory and gastrointestinal damage from exposure and most facilities don’t have the proper ventilation systems and protective gear for employees. Our post dye processing can prevent this toxic exposure.
Recognition
Denimaize will be exhibited at the London Design Festival and was presented at the Biodesign Challenge in 2019 at the MoMA. There, the project won a top 9 placement. It was also selected by university curators to be a part of the Weitzman exhibit as part of the opening exhibition of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design.