Comparative analysis of recycled rotor yarns made from cutting table waste that contain larger and regular percentages of recycled cotton

In the apparel industry, vast amounts of cutting waste are produced after garment manufacturing, and that waste is eliminated without reuse. Due to the availability of lower staple length fiber in the recovered fibers from the cutting table waste, a meager portion of waste is used with virgin cotton to produce yarn in a ring spinning machine. Higher amounts of lower staple length fibers are not feasible to make yarn in the ring spinning machine. Therefore, a considerable number of recovered fibers still needed to be used. Several studies used cotton fiber waste from and virgin cotton fiber to produce yarn in rotor spinning machines using a moderate percentage of recovered fiber, as the spinning yarn with a relatively higher amount of lower staple length fiber is feasible in rotor spinning. Using more recycled cotton fiber in rotor spinning would be more fruitful, which has yet to be studied. Our study aims to utilize a higher proportion of recovered cotton fibers with virgin cotton fibers to manufacture recycled yarn in rotor spinning and then analyze the recycled yarn's quality in terms of a higher proportion of recycled cotton fiber with regular proportion-maintained blend recycled yarn. Therefore, we manually blended the recycled cotton with virgin cotton by maintaining the ratio of 60:40 (i.e., 60% of recycled fibers) and 70:30 (i.e., 70% of recycled fibers). Several yarn physical tests with statistical analysis were done on both recycled yarns and found that 60:40 recycled yarn has better uniformity and less imperfection than 70:30 recycled yarn. Still, regarding material recovery and cost-effectiveness, 70:30 recycled yarn has more advantages over 60:40.

Automated summary

In the apparel industry, recycling cutting waste to produce yarn is an important but underexplored area. This study aims to utilize a higher proportion of recovered cotton fibers with virgin cotton fibers in rotor spinning to manufacture recycled yarn and analyze its quality. The results show that the 60:40 blend of recycled and virgin fibers has better uniformity and less imperfection, while the 70:30 blend is more cost-effective and allows for better material recovery.