The fashion industry is hugely wasteful. Millions of tonnes of clothing go to landfill every year.
Can we do anything about that? Think this podcast said .3M tonnes UK (Was that global?) annually
Can we make a kite design so cheap and fractally deployable that it can use 300,000 tonnes of wing material?
Can we make a standard stamp shape to cut the back of waterproof jackets out … Then attach to any cell on our network?
Where there’s muck there’s brass. There’s a potential to partially transform this waste.
Fractal kite stacking (Making a meta kite from other kites like a mothra of mothras…) Must investigate soon
Perhaps is the fabric was melted down and redone into fabric. In this case the finished fabric would have to compete pn the free market, and thus there would be little incentive to couple old clothes with kites.
I think the story of industrial scale electricity production is rather based on using the most expensive hi-tech materials available to allow for endurance and maximum scale.
What you are suggesting is a totally different approach. Interesting, but I would not place money on betting for that future to be honest
Eventually, Something has to be done with all that material. Price wasn’t the motivation for the thought.
If we’re considering small wing elements in a lifting lattice or meshed lifting kite network…
like this maybe
Where the scale comes from the network itself and the parts of the network can be individually addressed and serviced… I don’t think the most expensive hi-tech materials, nor even maximum endurance matter much. Say the panels of material can be swapped after 1 year by drone, (That’s hi tech) while the turbine on that node is dropped for inspection.
Assuming the recycled material is within a strength to weight performance spec, the lift required of a specific node may not need a whole lot of high-performance material.
Q. How much area of nylon jacket back, is 1000 tonnes of material?
With a good arrayable pattern deployment, How big a set of turbines could this support?
However much… it’s a lot more work to do the recycling than it is to work in roll stock. Also with pattern cutting density on roll stock there’s a lot less waste… Still… nice thought.
Shredding, Grinding, Pelleting, reforming as filament and staring again is probably better.
The material already has a function as clothing. It can be reused as such. If we want to have new clothing often, we should make it biodegradable, which is possible.
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Word on “recycling” plastics here is that all the “recyclable” bottles now go to landfills. The Chinese stopped taking our plastic waste years ago, and nobody else wants it.
The real reason for the cash payments for bottles and cans was to convince people not to throw them out their car windows, and so other people would pick them up if they did.
The drink manufacturers didn;t want to be seen as the cause of litter, so they made “recycling” happen as what was really a roadside trash pickup program, but unfortunately these days you have homeless people rummaging through everyones’ trash cans making a mess of the place in a new way.
Why would it be so important to recycle glass and aluminum?
Tell me if this chart of the most common elements in the Earth’s crust means anything to you. Note: After oxygen, silicon and aluminum are the most abundant elements in the Earth’s crust.: Silicon alone is almost 30%