Lululemon announces new recycled nylon

Over the previous 5 years, Lululemon’s Align leggings and shirts have turn out to be a $1 billion enterprise, bolstering the corporate’s projected $9.6 billion in world revenues. Demand for the shirts means the corporate is now making hundreds of thousands of those clothes a yr.

The important thing ingredient of the Align clothes is nylon, which is mixed with lycra for stretch. Since each of those are plastic-based supplies, they’ll find yourself sitting in landfills for hundreds of years, the place they gained’t biodegrade however as an alternative, break into tiny fragments known as microplastics that may find yourself in our oceans and meals techniques.

Lululemon has a plan to scale back the environmental affect of those garments. It’s unveiling a brand new materials: the world’s first nylon that has been recycled with enzymes again into nylon. To display the tech, the corporate has used it to make prototypes of its best-selling Swiftly Tech long-sleeve shirt. However Lululemon’s broader aim is to construct a round system the place nylon in clothes might be recycled again into nylon, considerably reducing the corporate’s environmental footprint.

Cloth-to-fabric recycling isn’t new. Corporations like Circ have developed a system to interrupt down clothes made out of polyester and cotton, then recycle the supplies again into new materials. Lululemon, nevertheless, tends to make use of lots of nylon in its clothes, which is costlier than polyester however can be extra sturdy and has extra efficiency advantages. The corporate needs to create a system that might permit it to recycle nylon with out diminishing its high quality.

To do that, Lululemon has partnered with Australian tech firm Samsara Eco which makes use of enzymes—proteins that act as catalysts in chemical reactions—to interrupt down plastic polymers, reworking them into their authentic chemical-building blocks, known as monomers. Then, it may possibly remodel these monomers again into polymers which might be chemically an identical to brand-new supplies.

Till now, Samsara Eco has used this know-how to create polyester, however this partnership with Lululemon marks the primary time it’s working with nylon. The merchandise made within the preliminary run carry out identically to shirts made with virgin nylon, says the corporate. “Our Swiftly high samples present the identical match, really feel, and high quality [customers] count on from Lululemon merchandise, which was completely crucial to us,” says Yogendra Dandapure, VP of uncooked supplies innovation at Lululemon.

Now, the businesses are working collectively to scale this know-how up in order that Lululemon can transfer towards a round system, which it specified by its 2020 impact agenda. One among its high priorities was creating sustainable supplies, since materials account for round half of the corporate’s carbon impacts. It has plans to transition all of its supplies to extra sustainable options by 2030, however in relation to nylon particularly, it guarantees to completely transition to recycled or renewable content material.

This month, the environmental advocacy group Stand.earth argued that Lululemon is deceptive clients about its environmental affect, notably in its reliance on fossil fuels for its plastic-based supplies and utilizing factories in Asia that burn coal. It filed a complaint to the Competitors Bureau of Canada, saying “[Lululemon] advantages from a rigorously constructed picture of environmental sustainability and wellness, and declare to make merchandise that contribute to a wholesome atmosphere, however their exponential progress has been constructed on fossil fuels, from clothes actually made out of fracked fuel.”

In response, Lululemon issued an announcement saying that it’s on a path to reaching a carbon footprint of zero by 2050, from utilizing renewable vitality in its owned and operated amenities and dealing with its companion factories to assist scale back their carbon emissions.

In relation to supplies, transitioning to recycled supplies would lead to a big discount within the carbon emissions within the manufacturing course of. And it additionally means not having to depend on fossil fuels to fabricate plastic-based supplies. “[We] have the flexibility to create new recycled nylon and polyester made out of attire waste, bringing us a step nearer to our end-to-end imaginative and prescient of circularity,” says Dandapure.

In my recent conversation with Calvin McDonald, Lululemon’s CEO, he stated the corporate has plans to proceed its quick fee of progress, notably because it expands globally. It’s means to fulfill its environmental targets depends upon how shortly and successfully it may possibly scale it’s sustainability efforts, together with materials improvements like this enzymatically recycled nylon. The query is how quickly Lululemon will be capable to acquire leggings and tops from shoppers, and remodel them again into new merchandise. We’ll have to attend and see, however shoppers and environmental organizations will probably be paying shut consideration.