Thursday, July 16, 2009

How Pantyhose Are Made

Some of you may have seen this before, but it's a very interesting video showing the production process for manufacturing nylon/spandex pantyhose. One thing that differs in the production of ActivSkin men's legwear is the addition of the fly opening. That feature adds several additional steps that are difficult to automate. This video was made at a facility producing women's pantyhose... maybe the next time we're making a visit to ActivSkin production facilities we can make a video showing this operation as well.


4 comments:

  1. One thing this video doesn't mention and should is that nylon comes from crude oil which isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, I would like to know if nylon can be made from hempseed oil which is supposed to be able to replace petroleum all the way.

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  2. Ranjit, I don't think you can make nylon from hempseed oil unless Dupont had something they didn't want to share. Since nylon comes from crude oil, it is possible to grow algae for generating the chemical equivilant of light sweet crude oil and it can be done almost anywhere on the planet which means no more oil drilling or wars. And since oil from algae is known as "renewable petroleum" and is environmentally friendly, no longer can people tell us that our nylon clothing is not environmentally friendly when more algal oil for green crude is produced. We need to be able to grow our own algae for light sweet crude locally. This will also help boost the hosiery sales for men and women in the long run. I could be wrong about this. Maybe Steve knows.

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  3. As Steve Katz is the true expert on things like this, I'll refer it to him and see if we can get some answers to these questions.

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  4. I am not aware of any research on trying to make nylon from anything other than petroleum sources, but it may be possible. Whether it is economical would need to be determined. A lot of work is going on in oil from algae, but it's mostly for biofuels. I don't know if anyone is working on synthetic fibers from algal oil, but it's entirely possible. I would suggest that even if it happens, it is years away from reality.

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