The role of fabric usage for minimization of cut-and-sew waste within the apparel production line: Case of a summer dress Esra Enes a, * ,S ¸ € olen Kip € oz b a Department of Textile, Faculty of Fine Arts, Mersin University, Mersin, Turkey b Department of Fashion and Textile Design, Faculty of Fine Arts and Design Izmir University of Economics, _ Izmir, Turkey article info Article history: Received 3 December 2018 Received in revised form 2 November 2019 Accepted 7 November 2019 Available online 9 November 2019 Handling Editor: Prof. Jiri Jaromir Kleme s Keywords: Cut-and-sew waste Waste minimization Pre-consumer waste Waste problem abstract Today, due to wasteful usage of the fabric within conventional pattern cutting, clothing manufacturing processes have created a cut-and-sew waste problem. As approximately half of the whole garment cost consists of fabric, this leads to both an unsustainable and uneconomical development of fashion. Therefore, in the fashion production process, fabric is the most valuable material. Besides unintended economic consequences of the waste problem, pre-consumption waste has serious environmental im- pacts. This study aims to minimize the cut-and-sew waste problem, focusing on the problem’s envi- ronmental perspective. Hence, the cut-and-sew waste problem, which occurs at the marker planning stage, is investigated to supply more ecological and economical production by increasing the fabric ef- ficiency and decreasing the cost of fabric. In accordance with the aim of the research, the case study aims to minimize the cut-and-sew waste, focusing on the fabric factor, by comparing various marker plans of a dress. Thus, the variances of the marker plan were designed and compared at the marker planning stage through a case study of a summer dress. The various factors regarding fabric are designs, such as asymmetric fabric, symmetric fabric, non-woven fabric and the fabric width 90 cm, 120 cm, and 140 cm. In these marker plans, the cut-and-sew waste rate is compared to find which width and fabric factor will provide the minimum cut-and-sew waste. Regarding this, the fashion industry requires a new perspective that eliminates fabric waste to solve uncontrollable fabric waste problems. Therefore, it is believed that this study will bridge the gap between academic studies and the fashion industry trying to reduce cut and sew waste. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Pre-consumer waste, defined as “clean waste”, occurs by the producer before the garment reaches to the consumer (Domina and Koch, 1997) and it is created during the manufacturing of fibre, yarn, fabric, and garment and produced by the fashion industry (Caulfield, 2009). Pre-consumer waste is classified as; textile swatch waste, end-of-roll textile, damaged textile waste, unsold clothing waste, cut-and-sew waste, sampling yardage waste, and clothing sample waste (Redress, 2017). On the other hand post- consumer waste is created after the consumption process (Rissanen, 2013) and is created by consumers (Caulfield, 2009), therefore this type of waste concerns consumers’ environmental responsibility and consciousness. The production process of a garment, in particular the cut-and sew waste phase, has a great effect on the occurrence of the pre- consumer waste (Rissanen, 2013). This study investigates pre- consumer waste, which is caused by cutting-and sewing stage in the fashion production. The fabric is “the most valuable component in waste minimization”, and cut-and-sew waste among the other pre-consumer waste types has the utmost importance as the fabric constitutes almost half of the garment cost (Bilgiç and Duru Baykal, 2017; Yes ¸ ilpınar and Aytaç, 2009). Designing with no waste such as zero-waste, recycling and upcycling would have a potential to avoid cut-and-sew waste, however, due to their potential of restricting the fabric size (Townsend and Mills, 2013) it is extremely difficult to adapt these methods to the industrial production line because of the need for design modification and the grading problem. There- fore, in this study, fabric is taken as the major factor for reduction of waste, through a careful placement of the marker plan and the choice of the most appropriate fabric type, width and cutting * Corresponding author. Tel: þ905423432403. E-mail addresses: esraenes@mersin.edu.tr (E. Enes), solen.kipoz@ieu.edu.tr (S ¸ . Kip€ oz). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Cleaner Production journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.119221 0959-6526/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Cleaner Production 248 (2020) 119221