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
1 year ago we made a partnership with DTU (Danish Technical University) on a final master tesis. We analyzed the very life cyclus and materials of three product categories to find out what recycled generated fibres did to the environment vs. conventional made fibres from virgin fabrics.
The results confirmed to us that recycled fibers are a significantly better alternative for the outdoor clothing of the future.
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
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.
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.
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
Face fabric (rPET): 32,4%
Insulation (rPET): 21,7%
Shipping (CN-DK): 9,9%
Sewing: 9,2%
Impact results
Shell Jacket
Face fabric (rPET) 18,3%
Membrane (PU) 12,6%
Buttons (Brass/Cu) 17,1%
Sewing: 11,3%
Impact results
Merino Wool Tee
Sewing: 36,48%
Transportation (CN-DK): 29%
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
The test results on the polyester products showed a big impact on the environment. But it also showed us that due to a significant higher ozone depletion if we made the products in virgin polyester (at a stunning 808% increase making the Ameland in virgin polyester and an increase at 194% on the Wavecrest for the ozone depletion) we are on the right path making products in certified recycled polyester.
The Ozone depletion is at a higher value with virgin polyester due to the extraction and making of plastic for the products which contains the environmental damaging Terephtalaic acid (damaging to environmemt and people).
The Freshwater Eutrophication* is also critical, mkaing a product non-recycled instead of certified recycled. Here you can see an increase of 194% in the eutrophication, which is an environmental critical issue.
*Freshwater Eutrophication is a word used for freshwater lakes and groundwater that contains to much nutrient salts such as phosphorus and nitrate, which are hormone-disrupting.
Washing is a big sinner
Washing your products is also a big sinner. The water resource depletion of washing increases with 415% on a midlayer jacket and with more than 1041% on a hard shell jacket if you wash your jacket more than 10 times pr. year or like most suppliers & brands are recommending.
Conclusion on the results
1. The results shows us that making recycled products is not the savior of the environment.
2. Making certified recycled products are a better choice, but still doesn't clean the surrounding environment.
3. Making the products abroad is not the biggest impactful category and often a production in Europe is more impactful, because you will have to ship the fabric across many countries before the processing of the metered goods.
4. Wool is by far the best alternative in the consumer phase, due to it's lower impact in the categories. It is though still a sinner in the productional phase, due to very making of the product.
Almost all impactful categories are increasing when making new polyester products.
This leads us to the 3 suggestions we have for your outdoor wardrobe.
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.
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.
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
Thank you for reading this theme. The results validation and method is found down below. If you have any questions to the methods please contact us at info@superstainable.com.
Yours sincerely,
Emil Rasmussen
Co-Founder
*(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)
