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.
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The Recycling Cycle
Collect, clean, granulate and spin: the recycling cycle of PET bottles. Water-shedding products such as bags and backpacks are made with the fibers resulting from this cycle. |
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.
VAUDE would like to advance the use of recycled materials.
The criteria for recycled VAUDE Green Shape products is between at least 30% recycled percentage on the finished product (for shoes) up to at least 90% (for apparel).
These limits are very high. For VAUDE products that are made with a lower percentage of recycled materials and therefore don’t meet the Green Shape criteria, we have introduced a new label in the Summer Collection 2016 that identifies products made from at least 30% recycled materials.
We want to enable our customers to better identify recycled products so that they can make informed decisions about their purchases.
Notes on this overview:
All recycled materials used by VAUDE meet the following standards:
