The mode and extent of damages inflicted upon cotton fibers by the mechanical actions during cotton ginning and the subsequent textile manufacturing processes have not been carefully studied in the past.

Preliminary tests have been performed in order to analyze the feasibility of testing tensile properties of single cotton fibers unraveled from worn garments and examine the changes in the tensile properties due to processing and repeated wash/drying. Single cotton fibers were unraveled from a worn T-shirt and a pair of worn blue jean as testing materials and tested through MANTIS^®. The tensile properties of fibers from worn garments were compared with that of raw cotton. Fibers unraveled from a worn T-shirt have shown significantly lower mean breaking strength, breaking elongation and work-to-break values than that of raw cotton. Fibers unraveled from a worn blue jean have shown almost the same mean breaking strength, but significantly lower mean breaking elongation (with a large CV% and range) and a smaller work-to-break than a raw cotton. For the T-shirt, the distributions of the tensile properties were all positively skewed relative to that of raw cotton. Above results suggest that damages inflicted on cotton fibers by processing and wash/dry seem permanent and irreversible. The results shown in this study, however, are all preliminary. The observations will lead to an expanded study on the subject.