Matt Dwyer, Patagonia’s Vice President of Product Impact & Innovation, and a self-described fabric guy, took the stage on day two of this year’s ISPO Munich to explain the loneliness of pioneers.
“First movers,” he said, “will almost always be voluntary.” Thus first-moving Patagonia has often found itself not so much leading the way as off by itself in uncharted territory. Certain fibers or supply-chain refinements that Patagonia spent ten years to develop other brands can now develop in about two, because the way has now been cleared. Complex problems require complex solutions, they say the company, and the prospects are all the more daunting when you take on the problems alone.
But it’s all good. From Dwyer’s perspective, Patagonia can do it all itself but has accomplished nothing if other brands don’t do it as well.
Dwyer spoke also of the “tension” – between, on the one hand, what a company hopes to accomplish and, one the other, what it must live with in its supply chain, and the bad news it might have to deliver to its customers. “I’d rather you hear it from me,” he said.
As for the big picture, Dwyer believes the industry is not yet clear of Covid. Patagonia itself has lead times of up to two years, and among the yields of the lockdowns have been a shortage of machinists for the manufacture of technical fabrics and the demise of many suppliers.
Others join in
Joining Dwyer afterwards were David Eklund, CEO of Icebug; David Stover, co-founder and CEO of Bureo; and Julie Gretton, charged with End-to-End Supply Chain Sustainability at Gore-Tex.
Gore, according to Gretton, achieved its planned 60 percent reduction in Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions five years early and has since refocused on Scope 3 – emissions from the production of purchased raw materials, which account for most of Gore’s emitting.
Gretton spoke also of Gore-s co-sponsorship of a free, open-source study on the electrification of textile plants. She appears to have been referring to Electrification of Heating in the Textile Industry – A Techno-Economic Analysis for China, Japan, and Taiwan, first published in December 2022 and revised in June 2024. Gore’s Fabrics Division was a sponsor, along with Burton, New Balance, REI Co-op and especially Patagonia. All are members of the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) and its Climate Action Corps. The study purports to show that “shifting to industrial heat pumps can lead to substantial energy reductions, reduced CO2 emissions, and lower costs” than “conventional systems.”
Icebug, the Swedish producer of high-traction outdoor shoes, has achieved what it calls traceability to the fourth degree: shoe manufacturer, outsole supplier, materials supplier and, finally, rubber plantation, oil field or what have you. For the past few years it has been laying out the results for the public on a part of its website called Follow Our Footprints.
There every shoe model has its own page listing the percentage content of bio-based and recycled materials, the CO2-equivalent emissions in kg per pair, and the component suppliers with their locations.
Eklund’s advice to companies with environmental ambitions is “interest yourself” – in other words, do the work, examine your supply chain, to find out where you stand. “Legislation is coming,” he said, in one of the ISPO’s many references to the EU directive on sustainability due diligence. “Tech will follow.”
Bureo has over the 12 years of its existence undergone a transformation from making skateboard decks out of recycled fishing nets to supplying other brands – Patagonia among them – with a material derived from the same. Called NetPlus, the material is sold as recycled nylon or recycled high-density polyethylene (HDPE). Bureo says that it can be used for fabric, hat brims, hard goods and other products and that it is entirely post-consumer recycled and traceable.
Rather than collect the stuff from the ocean, the company incentivizes fishermen not to create “ghost nets” in the first place and instead to deposit their worn nets with the company, which sorts, cleans and shreds them before passing the bits over to recyclers, for depolymerization. The resulting pellets are spun into yarn. The program is operative in Chile, Peru, Panama, Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico, the US, the Seychelles and Japan.
The panel ended on an anti-competitive note, in more than one sense. Stover said, “There’s no real need for competition right now,” to which Dwyer replied categorically: “Saving the climate is not competitive.” He further observed, in response to a question from a representative of Burton Snowboards, that the greatest barrier to inter-company cooperation is anti-trust legislation. Companies that seek to work together in environmental matters must take care to separate them from such matters as cost and volume.
Anti-trust and data
Before all was done, however, another member of the audience brought up another common theme at this year’s ISPO – data. This was Peter Fischer, the European Commission’s Policy Officer for Green Sport, for whom the world needs better ways to collect it.
Icebug CEO Eklund believes that companies should seek to establish industry-wide standards, for convenience and comparability. Dwyer recommended that companies “get on the ground” and commission a proper audit of their supply chain – one with high-quality, verifiable data. What the industry is missing, added Gore’s Gretton, is interconnectivity.
