Green Brand

Spiros estimates there are currently five to six billion pounds of pre-consumer cotton “table waste” from cut and sew facilities currently finding its way into landfills in the U.S. alone.

“What it enables us to do is use the clippings that have the least amount of value in the marketplace and that are destined for the landfill to create what we believe is the most environmentally friendly yarn in the world. There is no wet finishing and no dying. There is no chemical or liquid of any kind involved in this process. The yarn is price competitive, and you can’t tell the difference between my cotton and an open-end spun dyed cotton. I challenge any retailer to know the difference.”

Green Brand by Sansegal

Recycled Cotton has Arrived

Sansegal has been servicing the resort segment of the outdoor industry with screen printed and custom embroidered garments for nearly three decades. Headquartered right down the road from the Salt Palace in Sandy, they now sell upwards of 1.2 million shirts per year. Three years ago, the company launched a new label called Green Brand—a collection comprised of recycled cotton fleece—and that line has expanded rapidly. Green Brand now represents 15 percent of Sansegal’s business, with the National Parks accounting for fully 20 percent of total Green Brand sales.

Macon Rudick, owner of Sansegal, makes a compelling case that recycled cotton is not only the most environmentally friendly fiber on the planet, but just plain old good business.

“We first introduced a version of Green Brand fleece in 2002,” Rudick explains. “Jim Jakubecy of Green Spun Textured Knits, who in my estimation is a genius with a knitting machine, walked into our office with these recycled cotton fleece products, and it was the first fleece I had run across that I thought I could be competitive with in the marketplace. At that point we didn’t realize the National Park Service was getting ready to require their vendors to offer more environmentally friendly options. When our Park buyers saw the recycled fleece they were enthused, and they wanted us to come up with a recycled t-shirt, so we started scouring the U.S. for recycled shirts. The ones we found were so horrible I wouldn’t even try one on. So we started pushing Jim and Spiros Pantziris (of Spintex) to try and make a fine enough yarn from recycled cotton to make jersey. With the short fibers, Spiros came up with a ’16-singles’ (a relatively small diameter yarn suitable for t-shirts). So the question became, can Jim knit it fine enough and have it be strong enough to be a good product? We settled on a 75 percent recycled cotton, 25 percent acrylic blend, and it performs just as well as virgin cotton. It makes a wonderful 6.5 ounce shirt, which is one of the beefiest on the market.”

Recycled cotton is not new to the marketplace, but the quality has been considered marginal. Then along came Spiros Pantziris, a refugee from the high tech industry. His company is Spintex Yarns Limited, headquartered in Toronto.

“Basically, his knowledge of computers is what has allowed him to build and develop processes that allow him to do recycled in a way that no one else does,” says Rudick. “He is the only one in the business that I know of who will virtually challenge you to give him an order he can’t fill.”

“We’re textile spinners, and we were spinning yarn in the conventional form,” Spiros says. “We decided we wanted to continue spinning, but in a way that is different, and in a way that addresses what we see as a long term shift in the direction of environmentally friendly products.”

Spiros estimates there are currently five to six billion pounds of pre-consumer cotton “table waste” from cut and sew facilities currently finding its way into landfills in the U.S. alone. (This number is declining steadily as production moves overseas, but globally it is expanding.) Currently paper manufacturers buy all the cotton clippings that are either white or extremely light in pigment. The remaining scrap has virtually no value, and is generally discarded.

Spiros saw an opportunity, but there were a couple of obstacles.

“The first question is how do you make something that can be classified as a first quality yarn from these short cuttings. So we made some severe modifications to conventional machinery to be able to process the shorter fibers. That was the mechanical challenge.

“The second challenge was how do you take a random set of clippings in terms of color and grade them in a certain way and blend them to give the customer the color he or she wants? We need to color match, and color match with repeatability, regardless of the input of the clips, because we don’t ever want to be dependent upon the supply of clips. We also need to do this without having to maintain a prohibitive amount of inventory.

So we’ve created a grading system on color our suppliers have to adhere to. We can pull specific bales out, blend them together and produce a fixed outcome. We employ a blending technology that is proprietary to us so we can blend in such a manner that the eye sees either a solid or a heathered color. And we can create different combinations to achieve the same color. The formula may change depending upon the color of the clips, but the outcome is predictable.”

“As a result of all this, what it enables us to do is use the clippings that have the least amount of value in the marketplace and that are destined for the landfill to create what we believe is the most environmentally friendly yarn in the world. There is no wet finishing and no dying. There is no chemical or liquid of any kind involved in this process. The yarn is price competitive, and you can’t tell the difference between my cotton and an open-end spun dyed cotton. I challenge any retailer to know the difference.”

There are a broad spectrum of potential applications for what is currently a largely wasted resource.

“The recycled cotton can be blended with virgin cotton, polyester, acrylic, a performance fiber such as Outlast, wool, nylon, rayon, viscose, linen, hemp, etcetera, depending on the specifications and application of the customer,” Spiros continues. “We can blend up to 90 percent recycled cotton with at least 10 percent virgin fiber. We require the virgin fiber as a carrier of the shorter recycled fiber. These yarns can be used for sweaters, fleece, socks, t-shirts, upholstery fabrics, towels, bedding, etcetera. And everywhere we can use the recycled cotton in place of conventionally grown cotton, we’re eliminating all the dyes and the many chemicals associated with that process, and we’re diverting the clippings from the landfill.”

If the recycled content is substituted for conventionally grown cotton, they’re also eliminating the approximately one-third pound of harsh chemicals and the prodigious amounts of fresh water used to grow the cotton required for one t-shirt. Cotton is regarded as perhaps the most water intensive crop on the planet.

“At Spintex, we believe as a company that the environmental story is the most important part of our business,” Spiros explains. “We believe if the consumer understands what we’re doing with recycled cotton, they will eventually demand it and it will be considered a premium over a virgin product. Now we need major retailers to come on board. You can make it work economically and you can make it work from the standpoint of quality. If they can get it, we can do some really good things on behalf of the environment.”

Summer Market 2005 is Green Brand’s fifth visit to Outdoor Retailer as an exhibitor. The line has expanded and diversified each season, and in addition to t-shirts, now encompasses what they describe as “a fashion and weekend wear line for men, women, and children.” Included in the women’s collection is a yoga line. The company offers screen printing or embroidery (all done at their facility in Sandy) on every garment, and this is the way most Green Brand customers buy the line. But the fashion segment is strong enough to stand on style alone, and a growing number of retailers are responding to the “recycled” story and buying these garments as blanks. Green Brand will also be introducing a technical fabric here at Summer Market featuring recycled yarn called Outlast. (Keep your eyes peeled for the astronaut.)

Yes, Macon Rudick of Sansegal knows a good old fashioned market opportunity when he sees one. “I’d love to tell you I’m a tree huggin’ environmentalist, but I can’t lie,” Rudick chuckles. “It has to make economic sense too, and this recycled cotton does.”

(For more information on Green Brand by Sansegal, go to www.sansegal.com. For sales, call 800/338-6048. To contact Spiros Pantziris of Spintex Yarns Limited, call 416/291-7501, ext. 22. Jim Jakubecy of Green Spun Textured Knits in North Carolina can be reached at 704/867-2050.)

Re-recycling

In case you’re wondering, table scraps from the making of recycled cotton garments cannot be re-recycled for the same use. The “staple length” of the fiber becomes too short for the making of apparel. It can, however, be used yet again in other “lower grade” applications.