The North Face Is Turning Trash Into Fashion
Sustainable fashion is gaining traction with the help of The North Face, the high-performance clothing brand dedicated to exploration of the outdoors. The North Face is now joining forces with The Renewal Project to produce a collection of upcycled clothing they’re calling The North Face Renewed. Rather than throwing away defective or returned garments, they will repair and restore items to sell at a discount. Today, more and more companies are joining the circular fashion movement, within the context of sustainable fashion, and focusing on recycling and sourcing environmentally friendly materials, such as creating leather in a laboratory.
Textile waste is a huge problem in the fashion industry. Companies such as H&M have found themselves in trouble when it was discovered it was throwing away unsold clothing, and in order to find itself in the public’s graces again, it created an upcycled line called Waste. According to the EPA, landfills received 10.4 million tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) textiles in 2014, which accounted for 7.7% of all MSW landfilled. Rather than contribute to this wastage, The North Face coats, shirts, pants and various other items will be refurbished and on sale for anywhere from $26 to upwards of $100 through September as part of the North Face Renewed pilot phase.
But that’s not all The North Face is doing to combat waste. In an effort to protect and celebrate America’s national parks, it has teamed up with National Geographic to produce limited edition Bottle Source tees for $35. These shirts are created out of plastic bottles sourced from the waste streams in national parks such as Yosemite and the Great Smoky Mountains. More than 160,000 pounds of plastic bottles were collected from the parks and transformed into the T-shirts, which are branded with, “THIS T-SHIRT WAS TRASH.”
Imagine what else the world could create out of ‘trash’!
Article by The Beam
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