Most of modern fabrics are produce by synthetic materials and rarely new materials came from organic materials (as we already stick with few of the traditional materials as we known such as cotton, silk, linen, wool, jute, pineapple leaves, lotus silk and etc.). It shows that many other organic materials consist potential fibre to be use in producing fabric – perhaps need to go through different process.
At least that’s what student Adriana Santanocito and her friend Enrica Arena tried to do and successfully produced what they called Orange Fibre. Adriana was studying textiles at Politecnico of Milan, when she first thought about to produce the fabric from orange fibre. This idea came when she thought about how scientist can produced fabric out of milk and rice. Then she also thought about the problem of the citrus waste back at her home Sicily.
We can produce fabric with cellulose produced by plants that generally known as rayon. The fabric that made of bamboo is actually rayon. Still there’s nothing bad about it. In fact rayon can be produced at cheaper price, safe lots of energy and farmland to grow fibre plants such as cotton, flax, hemp, jute, nettles, yucca and many others.
By producing orange fabric, Adriana helps to make sure the orange waste used for something more useful rather than to left it rotten and safe the huge amount of money with the disposal cost. Instead of using new trees to produce pulp, why not using the cellulose from other waste product such as in this case – she did a very good job.
Rayon allows fabrics price become cheaper as the plants fibre produced by few types of plants are harder to produce. It also allow wider range usage of fabrics for applications from tea bags, to fabrics for high quality dress. The only things that we concern about rayon production is the usage of harmful chemicals and their effects to the workers and environmental effects (when the waste management not been carried properly).
Orange fabric is another example of creative idea on how we can safe resources that before treat as waste. As we know that in ancient times, clothes are afforded only by the riches and they are very hard to produce. With new materials engineering will allow us to explore more possibilities to get better materials that are not just cheaper but also good for the nature.