New clothing made from abandoned fishing nets

Creating high quality products from waste – a crazy idea? Not at all! Our suppliers for polyamide fabrics collect abandoned fishing nets from the sea. This polyamide is recycled into a new, high-quality material which VAUDE uses to product functional products.

The preparation of the fishing nets – including cleaning, chemical depolymerization and repolymerization processes take place in Europe. Thus new polyamide yarn is created from pollution – with the same chemical qualities and the same functionality as polyamide made from petroleum.

Pollution is cleaned up while crude oil, energy and emissions are conserved. Concrete figures, photos and films are available at www.econyl.com.

Another source material for recycling at VAUDE is used PET bottles. These are collected, purified, ground and processed to form granulate that is then melted and spun into yarn.

In this way, high-quality polyester is produced, which in its manufacturing requires 50% less energy and produces approx. 50% less CO2 emissions. Absolutely no fossil fuel petroleum is required.

Used textiles can also be recycled. In this case, the different polymers that make up the synthetic fiber are recovered and re-assembled.

A granulate is then produced that can be spun into yarn and woven into fabric. This reduces landfill waste because old textiles are recycled and not disposed of. There is also no additional need for petroleum in the reclamation of polymers.

Currently we can only evaluate those VAUDE products which contain at least 90 percent recycled materials and therefore bear the VAUDE Green Shape label.

We can currently only evaluate VAUDE products that are made from at least 90 percent recycled materials and thus bear the VAUDE Green Shape label. Overall, the share of these products in the Apparel Collection in 2014 was approx. 3 percent.

This proportion will rise sharply thanks to the use of the new recycled polyamide. Our goal is to reach a significantly higher percentage of products with recycled materials. The percentage of bags made with recycled materials is currently at 25% and the trend is rising.

Starting with the Summer Collection 2016 we will introduce a new label that identifies products with a recycled content of 30% or more. We want to enable our customers to better identify recycled products so that they can make informed decisions about their purchases.