Zachary Tinubu-Karch

Sustainable Systems May 2022

Urban Hack Final Sp

Research: My urban hack was looking at synthetic textile usage and disposal in New York City. Currently our utilization of synthetic textiles has a skyrocketed placing huge reliance on these materials. In New York alone each year 200million pounds of clothing ends up in New York City’s landfill. With synthetic textiles being derived from petroleum and other fossil fuels, the world’s fashion capital becomes a dumping ground for unwanted apparel. It’s important to devise a system to account for the potential circular solutions within this problem. Therefore I created Circular Synthetics: A proposal that brings material recovery and reproduction to Brooklyn Army Terminal, a hub for local manufacturing. The system takes local synthetic garments of non-renewable sources, breaks them down, and respins them in to new fibers for local industries, designers, artists, and people.  This started from wanting to extend the reach of my systems-map about performance textile: Lyocell.