As you can see from the following graphic, recycled products are already being used in many areas of our lives.
The fact that textiles are not listed separately in this graph shows how high the potential in this area remains. There is still room for improvement. We are working with our partners on solutions for a circular economy and in our product development on recyclable products as well as on continuously increasing the use of recycled materials.
Our objective:
By 2024, 90 % of all VAUDE products will have a recycled or biobased material content that is greater than 50 %.
The types of recycled materials we are already using follows.
Innovative, climate-friendly and extremely stable – this describes a new, sustainable material made from recycled household packaging that we’re using for the first time for the back panels of our VAUDE bike bags.
In Germany, plastic packaging for items such as spaghetti, bottles or empty yogurt containers are recycled in the “yellow bag program.” This waste is sent to large sorting plants where it is separated by type of plastic.
Yogurt containers, detergent containers, disposable flower pots and cosmetics packaging are made of polypropylene (PP), a material we can use for the back panels of our panniers.
After they are coarsely sorted, the plastics are mechanically shredded, washed and separated based on material density. The plastic flakes are then dried, melted and processed into a new granulate suitable for manufacturing new products, such as our back panels.
This is how the secondary raw material is produced from plastic packaging of German households that is collected and sorted in an innovative recycling process.
About 3 kg of packaging waste is processed for one back panel, reducing CO2 emissions for material production by 54 % *. The raw material obtained from this packaging waste is called 'Procylen®3' and was provided with components especially for VAUDE to make it an extremely stable plastic for the new VAUDE back panels.
This recycling method protects the climate and helps to make good use of Germany's plastic waste while conserving fossil resources.
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Source link:
"LCA Recycled-Ressource, Fraunhofer Institute UMSICHT on behalf of INTERSEROH Dienstleistungs GmbH, 2018."
VAUDE wants to continue to promote the use of recycled materials so we have raised our requirements within the VAUDE Green Shape label for the Summer Collection 22 – a product must have at least 50 % recycled weight content to earn the Green Shape label.
More information about the Green Shape criteria can be found here.
You can check the exact recycled content of your product directly in the care label or in the material overview in our online store.
All recycled textiles used by VAUDE meet the following standards:
Since 2020, VAUDE itself has been certified by the Global Recycling Standard (GRS). You can take a look at our certificate here. This certification allows us to verify the recycled content of a product and track it along the production chain. In addition, the GRS standard covers guidelines on environmental management and corporate social responsibility.
In order to label a product with the GRS logo, each production step must be certified. Starting with the raw material supplier, through the yarn supplier, the knitter or weaver, the dyer and laminator, to the garment maker and finally to us as a retailer.
Some of our material suppliers are already certified, but we are not yet allowed to label our product with this information. We are currently working on defining product areas in which we can certify the production chain in order to be able to label these products with the GRS logo.
