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Passport to sustainability?

12. Jun 2010 This was one of the ideas launched during a Cradle to Cradle seminar in Oslo recently, with EPEA Switzerland's CEO Albin Kälin as key-note speaker.

The idea stemmed from Annika Matilda Wendelboe who presented the world’s first Cradle to Cradle collection with what she admitted to include two short-comings: The buttons and a take-back system. Hence the idea of a passport to follow the clothes. Around 40 designers and people involved in the fibre and textile-business spent the day being inspired to think outside the box – including how to rethink packaging and how new social media-platforms actually can be part of a Cradle to Cradle strategy.
The audience included wool producers, designers, textile-experts, sports-companies and two representatives from H&M came all the way from Stockholm to hear Cradle to Cradle’s foremost international textile expert who also runs the Swiss branch of EPEA (which we also learned stands for Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency). Kälin’s advice was not lost on the Swedish chain’s participants: Fast fashion being the perfect scenario for bringing the customer back to the store every season with their “so last season” gear and to exchange it with the new season’s ”must haves”. A modern Cinderella story, if you like.

Wendelboe admitted that one of her main challenges had been the lack of fashion textiles with Cradle to Cradle certification, but that for her trial collection she had found upholstery and curtain fabrics that worked surprisingly well from Pendelton, Backhausen, Gessner and Trigema – the only actual clothing textile being piquet from the latter who produced the world’s first compostable t-shirt. Eager to touch the versatile pieces made out of both wool and polyester, the participants got the chance during lunch and after Wendelboe invited interested designers to join her growing network set on pressuring suppliers to develop fashionable Cradle to Cradle-textiles.

When H&M asked how long it actually takes for biodegradable textiles to decompose, and why the apparel doesn’t – as in Cinderella’s case – biodegrade in one’s closet or at midnight; Kälin told the interested crowd that the time-frame is six months, but two other factors have to figure in: A temperature of 40° C and microbes. For wool the time-frame is seven years, while EU-regulations demand a much quicker process – and added stumbling-block being that the same legislation does not allow for industrialized products even if they
are biodegradable, to be composted.

For Wendelboe one of the main stumbling-blocks, besides buttons (her sewing-thread, she assured the audience, is Cradle to Cradle) is the logistics of returns. That her designs are made to be versatile so that a dress could easily have many silhouettes and even become a skirt gives it longevity, but to actually guarantee return is her main obstacle – since the system relies on volume. Once this is solved, she plans to go in to production, launching the idea of a passport following her apparel as one option, thus creating a history to go with the fashion item as it gets resewn and upcycled in to something new.

Volume would, of course, not be a problem for someone like H&M.

Other examples cited by Kälin were Triumph’s Pure Origin underwear (available in Germany and on the Internet) and the French stocking-giant DIM (who work with Austrian Fein-Elast elastic fibres which are safe for biological systems). Triumph still hasn’t solved the problem of the metal clasps since the biodegradable ones are not good enough, while with new legislation around the corner in France on returns and the question of who will pay the cost – DIM may opt for a postage-paid return envelope to follow their C2C-products.
Wendelboe, who earlier said she had done organic materials, but always felt frustrated that she was just doing things a little less bad she now felt good about putting out something with absolutely no dangerous substances and with no harmful effects. And though she may not be able to pick and chose the brightest of yellows or sharpest blues as of now, her collection was not the least bit drab. She even boasted of having been able to produce a black jacket for men, which she proudly showed the audience – black being of course one of the problematic hue in the world of dyes.