When Canadian outdoor clothing brand Arc’teryx set out to create its most circular product yet, it drew a hard line in the sand. “We were not interested in creating a product that asked people to accept lower performance in exchange for lower impact,” says VP of advanced concepts Alexandra Plante. But balancing performance and impact, durability and recyclability, is no small feat.
It would take Arc’teryx four years to complete the Sperro SV — a technical hardshell jacket, launching September 4. Plante says it was worth the wait: the Sperro SV is the first fashion product (of any brand globally) to receive the Testex Circularity label, developed by Swiss testing and certification institute Testex to provide a common framework to substantiate circularity.
It is also the first flagship product under Arc’teryx’s new circularity initiative, System 0, which brings together product design, preferred materials, repair, services, manufacturing, consumer engagement, and responsible end-of-life solutions. Brand CEO Stuart Haselden refers to System 0 as “a systemic change in how we are thinking about and building our business for the future”.
Facing the biggest hurdles first While some brands
Facing the biggest hurdles first
While some brands target low-hanging fruit first — simpler products like T-shirts, fleeces, and basic lightweight jackets, which are easier to produce in a more sustainable or circular manner — Arc’teryx went in the opposite direction. “The hardshell is the most iconic product category that we have. It’s also the most technically complex,” says Plante.
“It’s trusted by our most discerning users — our mountain guides, professional athletes, and search and rescue teams. We chose the hard shell because it’s difficult. We knew if we succeeded here, we could succeed anywhere else in our brand.”
When designing circular products, many brands — including Swedish sportswear brand Houdini, alongside VF Corporation-owned brands Napapijri and The North Face — take a monomaterial approach.
This means using a single fiber type throughout, so garments can be chemically recycled as a whole, without time and cost-intensive disassembly for separate waste streams. For fashion and everyday apparel, cotton is often the monomaterial of choice. But in the outdoor industry, where synthetics are the default for qualities such as waterproofing and stretch, nylon 6 has become the industry standard, due to its durability and single monomer structure that makes chemical recycling more straightforward.
For Arc’teryx, a monomaterial design was never going
For Arc’teryx, a monomaterial design was never going to be the way forward, because the technical nature of its garments requires more complex fabrication. Instead, the jacket is made from a three-layer Gore-Tex fabric, of which the face fabric (the innermost textile layer) and the backer fabric (the outermost textile layer) are recycled econyl nylon 6, aligning with the industry’s current recycling capabilities to maximize material recovery.
At the end of life, they can be chemically recycled by Econyl’s Italian manufacturer Aquafil. The reflector, zips, sliders, cord locks, and the middle, film-like membrane layer of the fabric cannot currently be recycled (though pilot testing for recycling the membrane has taken place). Some may take this to mean the jacket stops short of full circularity, but Testex says it takes a holistic view instead, assessing across durability, repairability, and recyclability through testing and evidence-gathering.
According to the organization, this aligns the certification with the EU’s Product Environment Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR) and the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), both of which cover the entire lifecycle of a product. It’s a tension all outdoor brands will face. Plante refers to the brand’s hardshell jackets as safety devices; used in conditions where compromise is not an option, and where being seen and insulated against the elements is essential.
In this context, certain features are non-negotiable, says
In this context, certain features are non-negotiable, says Andrew Yip, senior director of Arc’teryx material innovation. This includes performance-focused details such as robust zippers, waterproof seam tape, and adjustable cuffs and hems. It also extends to safety features such as micro-reflectors, which are crucial for being spotted by rescue teams, according to Mike Danks, former team leader of Vancouver-based search and rescue organization North Shore Rescue, which uses and field tests Arc’teryx gear.
Such features are made from an array of different materials. As a result, the jacket isn’t fully recyclable, unlike some other circular products on the outdoor apparel market with fewer performance features. “When it comes to textiles, you’ve got to get comfortable with the idea that there’s no perfect product,” says Lucy Murphy, head of brand partnerships and development at Testex North America.
“There will be areas where a brand performs really well and areas where they perform less well.” In durability testing, the Sperro SV scored particularly high, Murphy explains, whereas for the recycling component, it scored lower. A pragmatic approach
Arc’teryx says its goal wasn’t to design out the functional details that customers have come to expect, even though keeping them would reduce the jacket’s recyclability.
Rather, it set out to design an efficient
Rather, it set out to design an efficient disassembly process, so that the recyclable elements could be extracted cleanly. This started with examining fabric lamination. The three material layers that make up the jacket need to hold together when the jacket is in action, while still being able to be deconstructed for recycling. Yip says that, in all, the team went through about 15 material trials with Gore-Tex.
Though the brand is keen to share republic, the Gore-Tex fabric is one element that remains exclusive to Arc’teryx. “The weave density, the backer, the yarn choice, those are all things we developed ourselves. But people will know we’ve got recycled nylon 6 from Aquafil, we’re weaving in Japan with Toray, we are laminating with [Gore-Tex manufacturer] WL Gore, and we are testing and validating with Testex
All of that is something that another brand could easily take and replicate, and we want them to do that because circularity is a system change issue,” says Yip. But competitors will have to figure the fabric out for themselves. Scaling up new supply chains was another mammoth effort, adds Sara Ellis, global product manager at Gore-Tex Consumer Garments. Due to supply availability, most of the recycled materials Gore-Tex currently uses come from pre-consumer sources, including factory-floor waste and offcuts.
Advocacy groups including the Ellen MacArthur Foundation
But advocacy groups including the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and Recycling Europe Textiles have called for regulators to incentivize the use of post-consumer waste instead, so brands using recycled content start to collect and repurpose the masses of post-consumer textiles that are currently non-reusable. For the Sperro SV, Arc’teryx wanted to do just that. “The textile drives the majority of the weight of the garment, so those inputs are going to make the most impact.
Getting those textiles back into the [production] stream is where we focused,” says Ellis. Feedstocks come from a wide array ofets. Arc’teryx doesn’t envisage a system whereby the Sperro SV will be exclusively made from Arc’teryx waste. “Thank god we don’t make enough jackets to warrant [that],” says Yip
Creating design feedback loops
For the construction, Acr’teryx lent heavily on its repair arm, Rebird, which launched in 2021 to feedback on which elements fail most often, which areas are subject to most wear and tear, and how disassembly and repair can be made easier. “Rebird [has been] a gamechanger for this brand. It’s a natural part of the design team. The team is so obsessed with the product that comes back,” says Katie Becker, chief creative officer at Arc’teryx.
We’ll look at areas that are delaminated around
“We’ll look at areas that are delaminated around a cuff or at a waistband and say, ‘We should go back to sewing that [instead of laminating it]’ or ‘This [construction method] would be better for repairability.’”
In parallel with reducing potential failure points, the design team increased the ways in which the jacket can be repaired (the Sperro SV has 80 different repair routines).
“One of Rebird’s biggest contributions was bringing years of repair experience into the design process. We’ve worked on thousands of Arc’teryx products over the years, so we understand where products tend to wear, what makes a repair straightforward, and where small design decisions can have a big impact over the life of a garment,” says Rebird VP Dominique Showers. Now, repair considerations are built in from the beginning.
Take the zipper stops, for example: in the Sperro SV, zipper stops are removable, making it easier to replace broken sliders. The Sperro SV is also the first Arc’teryx garment to feature a digital product passport (DPP) and an individual serial number, allowing each unit to be tracked throughout its lifetime. The team hopes that data from the DPPs will further add to the feedback loop, improving future iterations and other products to be released under System 0.
Our hope is to be able to track
“Our hope is to be able to track repairs and have really key information, which will help us design better products,” says Yip. The goal is for everything Arc’teryx makes under the System 0 umbrella to be certified with the Testex Circularity label. As the brand expands the range, feedback from certifiers and auditors will also be integrated into the design process, from lab testing for durability to potential improvements in policies and supply chain processes.
To create circular products, the design process needs to be circular in nature, too. “We have a five-year roadmap,” says Becker. “We started with the hardest, but we’re going after all of our core products.”
Source: www.vogue.com
