Page 386 - Solid Waste Analysis and Minimization a Systems Approach

364 APPAREL- AND FABRIC-MANUFACTURING APPLICATIONS

filaments to give the product a desired texture, durability, or other characteristic.
Textile winding, twisting, and drawing-out machine operators take the sliver and draw
out, twist, and wind it to produce yarn, taking care to repair any breaks.
Industries in the apparel-manufacturing subsector group include establishments
with two distinct manufacturing processes

1 Cut and sew (i.e., purchasing fabric and cutting and sewing to make a garment).
2 The manufacture of garments in establishments that first knit fabric and then cut
and sew the fabric into a garment.

The apparel-manufacturing subsector includes a diverse range of establishments man-
ufacturing full lines of ready-to-wear apparel and custom apparel: apparel contractors,
performing cutting or sewing operations on materials owned by others; jobbers per-
forming entrepreneurial functions involved in apparel manufacture; and tailors, manu-
facturing custom garments for individual clients are all included. Knitting, when done
alone, is classified in the textile mills subsector, but when knitting is combined with the
production of complete garments, the activity is classified in apparel manufacturing.
In order to make textiles, the first requirement is a source of fiber from which a yarn
can be made, primarily by spinning. The yarn is processed by knitting or weaving, which
turns the yarn into cloth. The machine used for weaving is the loom. For decoration, the
process of coloring yarn or the finished material is dyeing. Typical textile processing
includes four stages: yarn formation, fabric formation, wet processing, and fabrication.
The four main types of fibers include natural vegetable fibers (such as cotton, linen,
jute and hemp), man-made fibers (those made artificially, but from natural raw mate-
rials such as rayon, acetate, Modal, cupro, and the more recently developed Lyocell),
synthetic fibers (a subset of man-made fibers, which are based on synthetic chemicals
rather than arising from natural chemicals by a purely physical process), and protein-
based fibers (such as wool, silk, and angora).

26.2 Waste Management

Goals and Opportunities

The majority of solid waste generated by this sector is fabrics, mixed paper, plastics,
and wood. Table 26.1 displays the composition breakdown based on survey results.
As shown in the table, the recycling rate for this sector is approximately 34 percent.
Textile waste can be classified as either preconsumer or postconsumer. Preconsumer tex-
tile waste consists of by-product materials from the textile, fiber, and cotton industries.
Each year 750,000 tons of this waste is recycled into new raw materials for the automo-
tive, furniture, mattress, coarse yarn, home furnishings, paper, and other industries.
As derived from the solid waste evaluation model discussed in Chap. 12, the equa-
tion that estimates the annual waste generation per year per employee for this sector
can be calculated from the following:

Tons of solid waste generated per year = 7.29 × number of employees − 3.78
× solid waste disposal cost per ton + 40.5