Textiles and plastics

January 17, 2005

An increasingly interesting possibility for lightweight, strong, and potentially sustainable building materials is textiles and plastics.

Frei Otto’s pioneering work in tensile fabric structures such as the the 1972 Munich Olympics stadium is well known, and applications for small-scale exterior use have been seen from scout camps to refugee camps to polo matches, but today’s textiles and plastics are becoming more sophisticated.

A challenge might be to encourage exterior signage manfacturers to move away from nylon, PVC, and other unfriendly plastics toward natural fiber textiles or composites such as the more readily recoverable thermoplastic olefin (TPO) and biodegradable polylactic acid resin.

Learn more:

• “Textile World”, January 17, 2005
• “New Developments in Biodegradable Nonwovens”
• Google search on biodegradable textiles
• “Exterior Automotive Application for Advanced Thermoplastic Olefin Nanocomposites”
• Polyethylene terephthalate (PET)
• “Nanotextiles: Lightening the Load on Solidiers, Firefighters”
• Make your own biodegradable plastic from corn!