Designed For Recycling

So much of the clothing thrown away every day can be broken down into fibres and recycled into new clothing. There are barriers to this such as fibre blends and trims which make it more difficult and is the reason why so little clothing is currently recycled, in fact only less than 1% of clothing is recycled into new clothes.

One solution to making recycling easier is to use fabrics that are only
made of one fibre type, such as 100% Organic cotton or 100% wool
but fibre blends are useful to change the properties of a fabric.
Sometimes elastane is added to increase the stretch of the fabric, or polyester is added to recycled wool to make the fabric stronger so it
can last longer.

Fabrics that are made entirely of one fibre type such as cellulosic fibres or wool can more easily be turned into new fibres because the fabric doesn’t have to be broken down and sorted into different fibres, which isn’t currently possible at a commercial scale. We have also taken steps to stop using unnecessary trims in our designs, for example our jeans come without metal rivets to reduce the number of parts that need to be separated when the clothing is recycled.

We wish we could accept all clothing to recycle it into new fibres, but our facilities currently don’t allow for it. We hope that in the future we can build our take back scheme to accept all kinds of textiles for recycling but for now we can only accept old Baukjen and Isabella Oliver clothing to send to our recycling partners. We plan to increase the percentage of recycled fibres in our collection to simultaneously reduce our reliance on virgin materials and reduce the amount of textile waste going to landfill.