Nylon UP!

Nylon is an element used in a multitude of products extending past the textile industry. Nylon is used for making fishing nets, parachutes, cords, ropes, apparel and interior textiles, and as plastic. Because nylon is used in so many areas it is a great element to start with to begin to close the industrial loops.

Upcycling nylon puts old nylon products into new nylon products utilizing their technical metabolism.  By recycling nylon products this way it removes them from landfills and keeps manufacturer from having to create new nylon from scratch unnecessarily.

Intelligent Materials Pooling is defined by Michael Braungart in an article, Intelligent Materials Pooling: Evolving a Profitable Technical Metabolism, as being a “collaborative, business-to-business approach to managing industrial metabolism.” In an IMP business involved agree to share access to common supplies (in my solution, nylon), information and purchasing power. According to William McDonough and Michael Braungart in an article, New Perspectives, Nike, BASF and Herman Miller are the pioneers when it comes to IMP and have found that IMP is a key to optimizing the assets of cradle-to-cradle materials by focusing on technical metabolism.

My solution is that companies of all products (since nylon is so widely used) should form a community, regulate the toxic products and processes they are willing to use in order to gain their final product, and share the access to the high-quality nylon they are creating. One benefit of this solution is that when companies go in on nylon together they are able to buy in larger bulk orders than they would be able to single-handedly which will reduce costs spent. Another benefit is that since they have formed a community they are more able to hold a “monopoly” over the nylon companies which enables them to ensure that their sustainable demands are met during textile production. Lastly, they are able to donate more money to researching ways to upcycle nylon as well as a bigger pool of experience and information to share about technical processes and reprocessing.

The concept of technical metabolism is that a product is designed in order to go back into the technical cycle to create either the same product or a new product later. In the video they talked about a company, Designtex, that sought to make sustainable fabrics. Designtex’s goal was to create a “normal” product despite it’s sustainability. This meant that it still felt and acted as normal textiles would but had the added bonus of being sustainable. Designtex’s biggest component is that the life cycle does not stop at the “end of use” but extends to “reutilization” where it focuses on things like being recyclable and compostable, waste to fuel, closed loop system.

By upcycling nylon and reutilizing the nylon we currently have will be able to continue to create products that are worth as much now, if not more and maintain high quality.