Outdoor Retailer Show Highlights Eco-Conscious Fashion

Burlington Fabrics had the opportunity to showcase its eco-conscious Restora™ sustainable fashion collection at the Outdoor Retailer Show in Denver, Colorado, and to highlight other sustainability commitments.  The Restora™ collection is eco-conscious performance fabric. It is made from a mixture of recycled and sustainable content. Restora™ is a fabric made in part from recycled plastic waste. The idea, of course, is that plastic waste should not have to stay waste. By repurposing discarded plastic, Burlington is making sure that it does not end up in the environment – in landfills, rivers, or the ocean.  According to Nelson Bebo, Burlington’s vice president of technical sales development, the motivation behind the creation of Restora was love for nature. In his words: “We love the outdoors and we believe repurposing waste is a way for us to do our part to make sure future generations have as many or more opportunities as we do for a healthy environment.”  Restora is part of Burlington's Enthusiast Collection, and Bebo explained that going forward, all fabrics in that collection of performance fabrics will be at least 30 percent recycled content.  To create Restora, Burlington worked with a number of sustainability partners. Burlington sourced Eco Circle™ fibers from new partner Teijin.  Teijin creates Eco Circle™ fibers by means of a closed-loop recycling system that repurposes polyester-based garments. Their process enables them to remove and eliminate both additives and colorants, returning the polyester to the quality and function that it had originally.  In addition to Eco Circle™, Burlington used Seaqual™ fibers to create Restora. These fibers contain about 93-95% recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic and 5-7% recycled plastic reclaimed from the Mediterranean Sea.  The Outdoor Retailer Show also provided opportunities for other textile manufacturers to display their sustainable offerings. The show featured Repreve’s cationic-dyeable polyester and an expansion of its Repreve Our Oceans line.  Repreve is a performance fiber made from recycled materials, notably plastic bottles. The process produces a fabric with the ability to wick perspiration, facilitate adaptive warming and cooling, repel water, and generally function as a high-level performance fabric. The company that makes Repreve, Unifi, has been able to recycle more than 14 billion plastic bottles.  Another innovative fabric displayed at the show was DuPont’s Sorona, a plant-based recyclable faux fur. Sorona is made of 70 to 100 percent bio-based Sorona polymer fibers, and looks and feels like plush fur.  Indeed, in many ways what the Outdoor Retailer Show establishes is that the future of fashion will be dominated by fabrics that deliver a great look and feel and ecological sustainability.  Fabrics that do not compromise on the trifecta of performance, comfort, and ecological sustainability are the fabrics that will dominate the consumer market. In the competitive and increasingly green landscape of fashion, textile manufacturers and fashion labels alike will have to consider sustainability concerns as an integral part of their competitiveness.