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April is typically celebrated as the "Go Green" month. It's the month when everyone turns their attention toward Earth Day (April 22nd) and Arbor Day (April 29th) and many people look for eco-friendly projects to boost and make. I love April because it happens to be my darling husband's birth month, and he turns 50 this year. Also, April has a fabulous birthstone (diamond)! haha.
But, seriously, in celebration of the "green" month, I will be opening up some discussions about eco-friendly ideas, solutions, and projects. We will talk about using recycled fibers, dying processes, and projects you can make that will help the planet. While I am not an activist concerning the environment, I do believe that it is our duty as citizens of this planet to do our best to take care of what has been placed in our stewardship. So, without further ado...
Welcome to today's simple, but informational review on Recycling and Yarn.
Honestly, we see the word "recycle" everywhere we look. Most of us in larger communities have recycle bins for trash pickup days. We know that some communities have large facilities to separate recyclables into different categories. The most common are glass, plastic, and paper products.
Glass gets broken down, separated by colors, and remelted with new products to become something else like glass countertops and new bottles and jars. Repurposed bottles make fabulous kitschy light fixtures. :) But, can it be used as a yarn? No.
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| www.gpi.org |
Paper gets shredded into pulp and then gets soaked to get all the old inks out of it. Then it gets laid out on a huge strainer and huge rollers go over it to flatten and squeeze out all of the moisture. Then it's dried and turned into toilet paper and cardboard egg cartons and useful things like that. Unfortunately, there is a limit to how many times paper can be reprocessed. A cardboard egg carton is kind of an "end of the line" paper product. So, you might want to use those for planting your next garden. Can paper be used as a yarn? Also, no.
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| www.guernseydonkey.com |
Plastic, however, is sort of the king of all recyclables (in my estimation). Mostly because it has the most varied uses and according to treehugger.com can be reprocessed at least 10 times. Unfortunately, like glass, not every type of plastic is recyclable. But, a lot of what we use as consumers IS recyclable...like, those plastic bottles we use for our drinking water, etc. Not only can we use them as they are by cutting them up and repurposing them as planters, lighting fixtures, and art (which is the most eco-friendly solution), but we can also shred them into tiny bits and melt them down into something new, like plastic packaging (including corrugated shipping boxes), plastic furniture, sleeping bags, clothing and shoes...and YARN!! Yes, we have finally gotten to a commonly recyclable product used in yarn. Plastic. On labels it is called Recycled PET.
Recently, I used a yarn called Blue Ocean created by Svarta Faret Garn, a Swedish yarn producer. However, after I used it and wanted to share about it I found out that it has been discontinued. You can still find it in a few places if you google it. I thought it was a great little recycled yarn. I, also, used Noro Mirai, a cotton/silk blend, for the variegated sections. I got it on sale through LoveCrafts.com.
The project I made was a shawl/scarf called "Ziggy Interrupted" by Sandra Paul for my niece living in Taiwan, who is a bit of a flower child.
I thought the overall flow of the yarn was really nice. It was a bit stiffer than my usual cottons but still soft. And I'm in love with the colors. Would I use it again? In a heartbeat. Even though Blue Ocean is no longer available, LoveCrochet has the best lineup of affordable recycled cotton blends that I have run across.
If you are looking for other recycled materials such as silk, cashmere, wool, and linen, along with cotton, I would give WEBS a look. They also have something called a WEBS discount if you purchase over a certain amount.
Are there any cons to recycled yarn?
Is Recycled PET yarn the eco-bomb that it feels like it should be? On the one hand, we think- yay, recycled fibers, I'm doing something to help the environment! But, this article by Wolkat.com, a recycled textile manufacturer based in the Netherlands seems to point to a new and different problem created by using recycled PET in our textiles. While recycling PET into fiber delays the landfill problem for a time, it still remains. Because once the textile has outlasted its usefulness it still ends up in the garbage and in a landfill where, according to the Wolkat article, can take "70-450 years" to degrade. They do something called closed-loop recycling, which means that they recycle already recycled fibers.
The problem is that yarn itself cannot be "recycled" in the sense that other products can. So, in order to not perpetuate the continued landfill problem with our crafts, we have to look at a new way of doing things. Taking apart old projects and soaking the fibers to get their elasticity back, using old yarns you don't want to make garments with to create blankets for animal shelters, turning tiny balls into scrap projects; Here is a great article with lots of ideas.
The nuts and bolts of it are this: choosing to use recycled yarn is a personal choice, like everything else. We can look at it as a blessing to the immediacy of the crisis, or forego it altogether because it is still a "short term" answer to a long problem.
I like using recycled yarns because I look at it as doing something TODAY. I can't help yesterday and tomorrow has enough trouble of its own...but, I can do something today. The reality of it though is I still only buy special things like recycled yarn when it's on sale.
I much prefer recycling old projects because I consider it a better use of what I have. A lot of conservatorship and stewardship comes down to not being wasteful. It's ok to use and have new things. Heaven knows my yarn stash is full of new skeins I just had to have. hahaha! But, my very favorite things to design are projects that you can make from those random balls of yarn in your stash that feel like they've outlasted their usefulness.
The thing is...we don't always need "new" to create. I want to encourage you to use what you have to make your world beautiful.
Blessings!!
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