Our fabric journey: More tales of sustainability and the small business

There’s one major thing we’re on the hunt for at this show; a more environmentally friendly fabric solution.

As you might already know, the fabrics that are used to stand the outdoors are not the best for our planet. Not only are they made of plastic, but they normally also have a toxic flurocarbon coating to make them waterproof. We love the look, feel and performance of our current Heavy Duty Texturised Nylon (Cordura) fabric, we even already have a recycled version that we really like (Eco-1000)… The catch? It still has a flurocarbon coating and is only available in black, currently the minimum quantities to get custom colours are far more than we can afford.

We’re always striving to be better, we even have some recycled fabric being tested out by various people in the UK right now, maybe it will be the fabric for us, we’ll find out in a few months… but it’s always good to have options, so we’re heading to the show to discover more.

Over the past couple of years, as well as moving to flurocarbon free olive and rust Cordura, we have changed all our plastic sheets that line our Lil Presto and Shazams, to recycled HDPE made right here in the UK. Our liner fabric went from one that was made in China to one that is made in Germany and has a non-flurocarbon coating. We’ve moved our black Cordura to a 100% recycled Eco-1000 (the one we mentioned earlier) made in Germany from European post consumer waste. We sourced a recycled zip that is made in Italy for our framebags, and, once we have run out of our current coil zip, made between China and Turkey, we will be switching to zip from the same company.

Our objective is to have all our fabrics recycled, recyclable, flurocarbon free and made in Europe. Big goal, but we’ll get there, one step at a time.