Utilization of garment industry textile waste

Because of increasing environmental demands, especially on dealing with product life phase end, manufacturers and designers must consider future disposal of their products. In recent years, an increased emphasis on developing recycling techniques for industrial waste products has been placed, with the goals of protecting the environment. The aim of the work is investigation of the possibilities of reusing of cotton textile waste, generated during the manufacture in garment industry, as reinforcement in production of composite materials. The main focus has been put on the preparation and characterization of composites based on cut waste from garment industry. The materials have been cotton fabric and cotton textile waste as reinforcements and phenol phormaldehyde resin as matrix. The composites containing 60 % wt. reinforcement were manufactured by compression molding. For the composites, the mechanical and thermal properties were analyzed and compared to those of commonly used continuous fiber reinforced composites based on cotton fabric and phenloic resin. It was found that the composites based on cotton textile waste are more sensitive to processing cycles with respect to continuous fiber reinforced composites. Тhe mechanical properties for composites based on cotton textile waste are lower for about 25% compared to continuous one. The thermal stability, investigated by Martens method for both composites reinforced with cotton fabric and with cotton textile waste is very similar. The obtained results have shown that cotton textile waste could be reused for production of composite with acceptable mechanical properties and they can be successfully used in various industries as construction material