Over the previous 5 years, Lululemon’s Align leggings and shirts have turn out to be a $1 billion enterprise, bolstering the corporate’s $9.6 billion in world revenues. Demand for the shirts means the corporate is now making tens of millions 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 landfills for hundreds of years, the place they gained’t biodegrade, however as a substitute break into tiny fragments known as microplastics that can find yourself in our oceans and meals methods.
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 reveal 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 lowering the corporate’s environmental footprint.
[Photo: Lululemon]
Material-to-fabric recycling just isn’t new. Firms like Circ have developed system to interrupt down clothes comprised of polyester and cotton, then recycle the supplies again into new materials. Lululemon, nevertheless, tends to make use of a number of nylon in its clothes, which is dearer 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 constructing blacks, known as monomers. Then, it may remodel these monomers again into polymers which can be chemically an identical to model 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] anticipate from Lululemon merchandise, which was completely essential 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 in the direction of a round system, which it specified by its 2020 impact agenda. Considered one of 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 the case of nylon specifically, 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, significantly 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 fastidiously 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 comprised of fracked gasoline.”
In response, Lululemon issued a press release 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 services and dealing with its associate factories to assist scale back their carbon emissions.
Relating to supplies, transitioning to recycled supplies would end in a major discount within the carbon emissions within the manufacturing course of. And it additionally means now not having to depend on fossil fuels to fabricate plastic-based supplies. “[We] have the power to create new recycled nylon and polyester comprised 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 mentioned the corporate has plans to proceed its quick charge of progress, significantly because it expands globally. It’s skill to satisfy its environmental targets will depend on how rapidly and successfully it may scale it’s sustainability efforts, together with materials improvements like this enzymatically recycled nylon. The query is how quickly Lululemon will be capable of gather 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 likely be paying shut consideration.
