What is Zero Waste and why we love it

Did you know that on average, when cutting and making a garment, 15% of the fabric is wasted? And that in 2015, more than 5 billion square meters of fabric went to waste?

(Source: Gugnami & Mishra)

When Paulamar had been in the business for a couple of seasons, I began to feel that there was something to design that I had to incorporate. Intuitively, and using tools I inherited from architecture, I began to try out an alternative to making clothes. I made a couple of prototypes and then, fascinated by the results, I said to myself: This is the best! While researching, I came across some exponents and felt like I had found pure gold. There were more people in the world who were working on this subject, and without knowing them or talking to them, I already felt like part of a community. 

The #zerowaste movement was born in Australia, when Bea Johnson decided to adapt her life to live it without generating waste . For this, she created a simple but important list of basic rules to start living a “zero waste” life. These were the origins of the Zero Waste movement, which over the years has been gaining ground and can be applied to a myriad of topics. https://zerowastehome.com

Applied to garments, Zero Waste pattern making is a garment design, cutting and sewing technique where the entire cloth surface is used without leaving any unused scraps or fragments that could be considered waste.

There are very old examples of garments that do not lose scraps along the way, such as saris from India, the togas of the Greeks and Romans (beautiful Caryatids) and the kimonos from Japan that were made using the entire cloth.

The first records of garments with the #zerowaste tag correspond to the doctoral thesis of designer Timo Rissanen at the University of Sydney, Australia in 2013. While it is true that humanity has been creating garments achieving this result for many years, Timo takes it to the laboratory level where tests and collections are developed and the technique is investigated at a training level, exploring the different variants of how to achieve a #zerowaste garment. Definitely, very entertaining.

Today, it is possible to find exponents of this technique in different countries, each seasoned with its own social , cultural and technological background . I find that what is super beautiful about these unconventional techniques: the freedom we have as designers to explore, to interpret the codes of clothing to create new garments, governed by one and only one rule engraved in fire: that the generation of waste is zero .

Do you apply any Zero Waste in your life? Tell us!