Seattle-based athletic brand Girlfriend Collective takes sustainability really seriously. It offers stylish, sustainable, and size-inclusive activewear, from trendy bike shorts to wear-everywhere sports bras all made from recycled PET bottles and fish nets.
Here’s a breakdown of each of the brand’s products:
Compressive Leggings + Bras: Made from 79% recycled polyester (or RPET) and 21% spandex, the leggings are made from 25 recycled post-consumer bottles and bras are made from 11.
LITE Leggings: Made from recycled fishing nets and other waste using ECONYL yarn, LITE fabric is made up of 83% recycled nylon and 17% spandex.
Cupro: The tees and tanks are 100% cupro, a delicate fibre made from waste the cotton industry leaves behind. The yarn is made in a zero-waste, zero-emission facility in Japan, then constructed at the brand’s SA8000-certified factory in Hanoi.
Reusable Pouch: The reusable pouch is made with the same RPET as the bras and leggings.
From bottles to fabric
Did you know almost all synthetic activewear is made from plastic? Girlfriend Collective just makes theirs with materials that would otherwise clog landfills and pollute the earth. It all starts with 100% post-consumer water bottles that have their labels removed, are crushed into billions of miniscule chips, and then washed until they’re sparkling clean.
After a bunch of science stuff with names like “polymerisation,” you get a soft, recycled yarn that eliminates the need for petroleum and diverts water bottles from landfills at the same time.
All of the brand’s textiles are made from recycled materials in its facility in Taiwan that specialises in eco-friendly and high-quality textiles, then cut-and-sewn in its SA8000 certified factory in Hanoi, Vietnam, that guarantees fair wages, safe and healthy conditions, and zero forced or child labour.
SA8000 is a social accountability standard and certificate developed by Social Accountability International (SAI). The certification helps and protects workers worldwide by providing a standardised guideline to protect the integrity of workers’ conditions and wages. SA8000 overlaps with Fair Trade certification, but while Fair Trade is predominantly used for farming, SA8000 is a certification used in factory conditions.
The recycled fabric is certified Standard 100 by Oeko-Tex, the world’s leader in testing fabrics to regulate harmful substances.
The recycled Polyester
Taiwan, where the brand sources all of its post-consumer water bottles, used to be called “Garbage Island”. A small island nation of 23 million people, the government saw the danger of ignoring the problem, and through widespread change has transformed Taiwan into a world leader in recycling, with 55% of waste being recycled (as opposed to 35% in the US).
Recycling is a community affair in Taiwan. Each night people gather to sort their waste into containers as a community – recyclables, food waste and garbage. Rather than leave, they stay and talk until the trucks come and pick it up, turning what could be a tedious affair into a connective one.
Programs and volunteer groups have sprung up all over Taiwan to help bring this community spirit outside of city centers. The Tzu Chi Foundation sets up micro-recycling centers in rural areas across Taipei. Run mostly by retired people, they set up drop off points to give people both, access and education to recycling, and to promote environmental stewardship in their free time.
Recycled fabric starts Somewhere
After all the bottles are sorted into their respective categories (#1, #2, #3, and #4 plastic), they are sent to their processing centers. The leggings and bras are made from #1 plastic – or Polyethylene Terephthalate, also known as PET. All polyester (recycled or not) is derived from this type of plastic.
Our bottles are sorted, cleaned, and chipped into feedstock at the center. The processing center is owned by a respected Taiwanese family that has been at the forefront of the recycling industry for decades. It’s not only trusted by the Taiwanese government, it’s certified by them too. Being government certified means more than just having a certificate hanging on your wall saying that you can process plastic to resell. It means security measures are implemented and each facility is subject to accountability for how much plastic is taken in and how much is shipped out.
Why is being certified so important? It is a well-known fact in the recycling industry that in places with loose certifications and accountability standards, many will lie about where they get their plastic. It’s actually much easier to buy new plastic water bottles and recycle them, than to collect and sort post-consumer bottles. Often, recyclers will recycle brand new bottles as post-consumer bottles and sell them at a higher price to brands that are trying to use recyclables in their products. At the brand’s facility, the company checks as bales of post-consumer bottles from all over Taiwan arrive at the facility. Each bale is weighed and logged. From there the bales go into a steam wash to remove caps and labels. After the caps and labels are removed, the bottles are sorted by colour. Girlfriend uses only the clear bottles for its fibres, and the coloured bottles get sent elsewhere to be processed for myriad other uses.
Once the colour sorting is done, they are shred down into tiny chips, washed again, and placed in transport bags to be shipped to the manufacturing facility. Each bag is weighed and logged again to make sure that the output is equal to input. This ensures an accurate count for how many bottles were used and can verify that they were the same bottles processed at arrival.
How the fabric gets made
As soon as the spinning mill takes the delivery of the raw PET chips from the recycling center, the bags of chips go through another wash and are dried. Once they dry, the chips get sent to storage silos and are sent to a machine where the chips get heated up and extruded into long thick spaghetti like strands. From there, they are chipped down to little pellets.
The pellets then get reheated and are extruded again to make superfine threads that are spun together into yarn. From there they are spun onto large bobbins, packaged, and sent to the knitting factory.
The knitting process requires time and precision, which means each of the knitting machines can only produce about 100 pairs-worth of fabric in a 24-hour period.
The dye process
Once the fabric is knit, it gets sent to the dye house. The dyeing process is often environmentally destructive, with many facilities opting for non eco-friendly dyes and chemicals, and choosing to dump wastewater freely into water sources like streams and rivers. But at the brand’s facility, every single drop of water that is used to dye fabric gets sent to the wastewater treatment plant literally 100 feet away from the machines. There, the water gets treated to separate out the OEKO-certified safe dyes and stray fibers. When everything is separated, the water is measured to make sure it’s safe to release. The devices that measure this are set up to send information in real time to the Taiwanese EPA. With their approval, the water is then discharged.
The brand’s fabrics are dyed with eco-friendly dyes and the wastewater is carefully cleaned and cooled before it is released. (Girlfriend Collective even donates the dye mud to a local pavement facility where it’s recycled into sidewalks and roads!)
The unique dyeing process can result in some irregularities in colour, which are not considered damages.
Leggings from fish nets?
Every year, millions of marine animals – like sea turtles, seals, dolphins, and whales – are harmed by ocean plastic pollution. About 10% of the estimated 14 billion pounds of trash discarded in the ocean annually is made up of abandoned, lost, or discarded fishing gear.
That’s why Girlfriend makes its LITE leggings with ECONYL, a fibre made from recycled fishing nets and other waste that would otherwise be discarded into oceans and landfills. By using this recycled material, the brand helps clean oceans, recycle that waste, and cut out the need for raw materials like crude oil, which are traditionally used in the production of nylon.
Source: https://www.girlfriend.com/
