INTERNATIONAL SPOTLIGHT
THE STEEP PRICE OF CHEAP FASHION
Fast fashion is piling up, a group of students at the American University of Beirut is working on solutions.
Written by Reina Chmayssany
Photo: Getty Images
This article first appeared in Mechanical Times, the ASME AUB Student Section’s annual newsletter, and was reprinted with permission.
WHO DOESN’T LOVE DISCOUNT SEASON at the local shopping mall? The rows upon rows of brand-new, clean-smelling sweaters, and the vast masses of meticulously cut blue jeans. The smell of brand-new clothes at our favorite retail stores fuels our craze for consumerism as we hunt for our next fashion find. You shop till you drop and then go back home with bags full of pretty tops and jackets, amongst other pieces of the seemingly infinite products you see at just one store.
However, when the fabric of your favorite top gets loose and baggy, your jeans rip at the hem, or when the wool in your brand-new sweater starts to pill after a few runs in the washing machine, what happens then? You do either one of these things: you discard the piece or donate it, which then eventually gets thrown away. After that, you go out again to get a replacement for your ruined clothes at another mass-producing clothing store, and once again, you go through that euphoric shopping craze.
And then the cycle continues, leaving behind an endless trail of waste that accumulates in dumps over time, as your favorite high-end multibillion-dollar fashion retail companies produce more and more trendy pieces around the clock. Doesn’t sound so pretty anymore, does it?
Fast fashion has become an alarming source of pollution as of 2025. Indeed, Business Insider has reported that fast fashion manufacturing comprises 10 percent of total carbon emissions. Furthermore, this industry depletes water sources and actively pollutes rivers, while 85 percent of all textiles produced end up in dumps each year. Additionally, fashion retail companies use materials like polyester, nylon, and acrylics that take centuries to biodegrade. For instance, the increase in textile waste that results from fast-fashion products has made up to 35 percent of microplastics found in the oceans due to the production of polyester.
Photo: Getty Images
With the accelerated global concern over the alarming statistics surrounding the contamination of fast-fashion products in landfills and oceans, questions arise about forming a suitable recycling process that would mitigate the growing levels of accumulated textile waste. An added challenge to this is the multifaceted material composition of produced pieces, which makes the sorting process a complicated one.
However, an innovative group of 4th-year mechanical engineering students at AUB has developed a final-year project that aims to resolve the issue of detecting different types of textiles and sorting them for efficient recycling. The project consists of an automated fabric sorting robot arm that uses hyperspectral imaging and a developed machine learning algorithm to sort fabric based on its predicted type, be it wool, polyester, or a blend of both.
A hyperspectral imaging system (HSI), collects and processes data across the electromagnetic spectrum. Similar to how a regular camera produces photographs relative to the red, blue, and green scales, an HSI camera splits light into hundreds of continuous, narrow wavelengths, which hit each pixel in the material in question and reflect. Based on the unique reflectance resulting from the different fibers in the textile, the students are able to identify the specific 3D chemical print that belongs to that specific fabric, and can sort it accordingly.
Mary Zogheib, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student working on this FYP, has touched upon the potential of their project to be a viable solution to effectively sort textiles based on their exact material compositions. She stated: “This project can help in facilitating the sorting process, as the recycling procedure cannot happen if all the textiles are mixed. Hence, by integrating this project into textile sorting plants, fabric sorting can occur in an accurate and precise manner.” She also added: “The fact that the whole process is automated plays an important role in reducing manual labor, which is redundant and inefficient, and can lead to multiple errors in the sorting process. At the end of the day, our project is a proof-of-concept. However, when integrated on a large, industry-level scale, it has the potential to revolutionize the textile recycling operation.”
Reina Chmayssany is a mechanical engineering major at the American University of Beirut and member of the ASME AUB Student Section.
Photo: Getty Images
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