Sustainable Textile Designs Made from Renewable Biodegradable Sustainable Natural Abaca Fibers

Abstract

Nowadays, interest in sustainable and renewable-origin textile fiber usage on textile design and fashion is increasing with the increasing environmental problem. Therefore, sustainable textile designs made from renewable biodegradable, sustainable, and natural fiber alternatives has become a recent trend. The textile industry is now turning its face to biodegradable and environmentally friendly textile resources for their designs to leave a livable world for future generations. In the recent years, abaca fiber which is a renewable, biodegradable, sustainable, eco-friendly, and natural fiber alternative for the textile designs comes into prominence with their ecological properties and superior daily usage performance. Indeed, abaca fibers are biodegradable and renewable natural fibers and are listed among the sustainable textile resources. The abaca plant endemic in Asia is usually grown in the Philippines, Ecuador, Borneo, and Sumatra. Abaca fibers display a wide range of different designed applications owing to their promising properties. In many years, abaca fibers have been used for ship navy, rope, fishing net, etc. Also, the use of abaca fibers as paper is quite common. In the recent years, natural sustainable textile fibers have been preferred not only in apparel sector but also in technical textile applications such as composite material designs and products. For instance, many different designed products such as garments, clothing, shawls, curtains, furnitures, carpets, mats, hats, coasters, pillows, packaging materials, handicraft products, decoration materials, decorative lamps and lampshades, flower-wreath ornaments, multipurpose baskets, tabletop accessories, sports equipments, ropes, fishing nets, bags, papers, money papers, cigarette filter papers, wrapping papers, tea bags, cardboards, chipboards, liquid filtration filters, and various industrial textile materials such as medical articles and composites for different purposes can be made from abaca fibers. Indeed, nowadays, abaca fibers can be utilized in the place of glass fibers in automotive industry technical textiles and composite applications. In this chapter, information regarding abaca fiber, its production, its chemical structure, and its physical, chemical, and mechanical properties and sustainable textile designs made from sustainable abaca fibers, is given in detail.