Theme

A responsible outdoor wardrobe

How to build up your wardrobe in a responsible way and what to look for if you want to take action on better products for the environment?

Theme: A Responsible Outdoor Wardrobe

Outdoor gear & clothing has been a climate and environmental challenge ever since the first products hit the market. The industrialization and the very fact that people wanted to get more and more equipped on adventures challenges the very way of producing outdoor wear.

How do you comprohend and connect outdoor gear and responsibility?

Outdoor wear has the capabilities to protect you against the changing times of the weather as you use the products on your adventures and everyday life.

But, the products are still in general made from environmentally disastrous fabrics in most cases as fx. polyester which is a synthetic plastic material. Polyester is made from plastic, and it can take shape like many different types of fabric; eg. can polyester look like viscose or even wool.

Basically, polyester consists of oil and natural gas, which are converted into plastic through an advanced chemistry (roughly said - we don't dig into the proces in this theme). The plastic is then further processed so that it is converted into the synthetic fibers that make up the polyester fabric, which can be used as your new midlayer jacket, insulation or as the hard shell in your new alpine jacket.

Polyester fibers are smooth, which creates the polyester fabric's smooth and sometimes shiny surface.

So it can be very hard to comprohend and connect responsibility and the making of outdoor wear, but it is possible to make better alternatives to environment.

Everything comes with a price

inside the seams

Where does the impact come from?

3 product categories where tested. to fin out how we can build up a proper and more responsible wardrobe.

Read on to see the results of the test*

Insulated Midlayer Jacket

Insulated Midlayer jacket
Functional unit:
Provide full coverage and insulation of the body from hip to shoulder as well as from shoulder to wrist of both arms for a size large male for a duration of 5 years of everyday use in Denmark.

Merino tee

Plain wool T-shirt
Functional unit:
Provide full coverage of the body
from hip to shoulder and the upper

Part of the arms of a size large male for a duration of 2 years of everyday use in Denmark.

Outer Shell Jacket

Waterproof jacket
Functional unit: Provide full coverage, wind-proofing and waterproofing at a level of minimum 20.000mm of the
body from hip to shoulder as well as from shoulder to wrist of both arms for a size small female user for a duration of 5 years of everyday use in Denmark.

Midlayer Test Results

Ameland

Impact results

Shell Jacket

Impact results

Merino Wool Tee

Polyester: A closer look

It's clear that the polyester fabrics are very impactful fabric to make to our planet, so let's dig further into the polyester and what makes the impact so significant.

Material & User sensitivity

Recycled vs non-recycled material

3 advices on a responsible outdoor wardrobe

Wash less

Due to the significant high amount of water depletion which is quite impactful on our planet we encourage you to wash your products less and impregnate them instead with a bio impregnation spray to keep the lamination and membrane water repellant.

Certified Yarns

It's not enough to just look for "recycled" when shopping. To be sure, that your product comes from landfill material and is collected correctly it needs to be certified (like the GRS certification).

The recycled fabrics has a siginifcant lower impact to environment when you are not using Terephtalaic acid to make virgin polyester.

For midlayer jackets the results showed us a decrease of 800% in the impact to ozone depletion.

Get some wool

Stop using polyester as your innerlayer. Wool has a way smaller impact to the planets resources and the very feature that wool needs to washed less makes it the best alternative as an innerlayer.

thanks for reading

Thank you

Data validation

*(The programme used for modelling and the results was SimaPro)

*(Method used for analysis: ILCD 2011
Midpoint+
Using system expansion and
consequential modelling
Normalization done in corespondance
to a European citizen)