©Daniel Sharp

Last month in The Thought Kitchen, we sat down with Jamie Bainbridge, our Director of Textile Development and Sustainability, to get a behind-the-scenes look at the Eco Index—a collaborative effort to create an industry-wide standard in sustainability. This month, we’re taking a deeper dive into the nitty gritty details of this innovative tool and putting our Men’s Vice Blazer to the test. Find out what we learned and how it’s going to change the way we do business.

How It Works: The Cliffs Notes Version
Building a tool that assesses the environmental impact of thousands of products produced by hundreds of companies is challenging, and some might even say, downright impossible. That’s why the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) built the Eco Index as a three-tiered system, so that any company, no matter how small or large, can evaluate their business piece-by-piece.

All three levels—guidelines, indicators and metrics—allow companies to evaluate their products based on two crucial elements: lifecycle stages such as packaging, transportation and materials; and impact such as the use of waste, water and other resources.

The first level—guidelines—is merely a set of recommendations that companies can use to lessen their impact: use more recycled content, minimize packaging, institute end-of-life design policies, etc… The second level—indicators—gets a bit more technical and even incorporates a scoring system that allows companies to assign points (we’ll take a closer look at indicators when we evaluate the Vice Blazer). And finally, the third tier—metrics—requires lots of number crunching and accounting that assigns values to each indicator. Confusing? Yes. Effective? We’ll see.

To get a better grasp on the set-up, think of it like this: guidelines ask what am I doing?, indicators ask how am I doing?, and metrics ask how much am I doing? But despite their qualitative and quantitative differences, every level is designed with the same goal in mind: to increase the transparency of the supply chain and lower the environmental footprint.

©Daniel Sharp

Sizing up the Vice Blazer: Materials and End of Life
So what does all of this mean for a company like Nau? To start, we can use the Eco Index indicators to evaluate each of our products. Take the Vice Blazer, for example. We picked three sample indicators to size up its environmental footprint and here’s what we learned:

1 Recycled Content
For this indicator, the Eco Index assigns points based on the percentage of recycled content that is used in the product (1 point for 10-24%, 2 points for 25-49%, etc…). But keep in mind, all scoring is merely an internal gauge of a company’s sustainability practices and, in no way, reflects a standardized ranking system (yet). Since the Vice Blazer is designed with 80% recycled polyester, we feel like we’re pulling our weight in this category. However, we still keep an eye on technology to see if more improvements can be made.

2 Renewable Content
In order to produce the premium quality of the fabric in the Vice Blazer, we added 20% certified organic cotton which reduces the use of pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals. It also gives recycled polyester the smooth, soft feel of cotton.

3 Designed for End of Life
We designed the Vice Blazer to be recycled at the end of its long life, including the labels which are composed of recycled polyester. However, there are two components that could be improved based on this indicator: the back zipper and the cotton content which are both unable to be recycled at this time.

Even though organic cotton is a renewable resource, it is considered a non-polyester “contaminant” and is, therefore, dissolved through the recycling process. In the end, we are throwing away 20% of the garment even though 80% is being recycled and reused.

This begs the question: do we sacrifice the soft quality of organic cotton to produce a completely100% recycled blazer? Or do we include cotton, a renewable resource to create a more premium garment that looks and feels better to the consumer?

These are the design and sustainability questions we face every day as a company dedicated to creating beautiful performance products that balance the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit. And with the launch of the Eco Index’s pilot program in September, these are the tough questions every apparel company will have to answer in creating more sustainable and transparent product and supply chains. However, one, lingering question remains: will it actually work?

Stay tuned: In part three of our three-part-series, we’ll explore the inaugural launch of the Eco Index pilot program and find out if it will actually live up to the hype.

Practicing the Pop-Up

Our friends at Warm Current have combined three of our favorite things—surfing, sustainability and giving back—and created an ingenious non-profit that helps underserved kids learn how to surf. For the past three years, they’ve collected tired, old wetsuits and surfboards, polished them up, and used the gear to outfit kid’s surf camps across the Pacific Northwest, Peru, Mexico and Morocco.

Now, for the first time, they’ve launched a brilliant fundraising campaign, The Faces of Warm Current, that will help spread the love of surfing and the outdoors to kids that would otherwise go without.

This is how it works: From now until July 31^st, you can donate a mere five bucks and purchase a square containing a message or photo that will become part of a giant mosaic on the side of the kid’s surf camp trailer. The money will be used to buy new kid’s surfboards, new wetsuits and a trailer that will tour up and down the West Coast.

Even if you’ve never ridden a wave, this is a cause to get on board with. Break out your old wetsuit and send it their way. Teach a lesson. Donate a five spot (or more). And if you haven’t done so already, check out their website: Warmcurrent.org.

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This week in The Thought Kitchen, we sit down with Jamie, our Director of Textile Development and Sustainability, to get the inside scoop on her collaborative efforts on the Eco Index, a new tool that will take the BS out of “green” and set an industry-wide standard in sustainability. For Nau, it will give us—and many other companies—a deeper understanding of our environmental impact and how we can make it better. Sounds too good to be true, but it’s already happening.

There’s lots of buzz about the Eco Index, but I’m still not sure what it is or how it works.
Jamie Bainbridge: Basically, it’s a grassroots effort that was started about three-and-a-half years ago by the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) to help create a tool that would give companies a deeper understanding of the environmental impact of their products. About 100 member companies of OIA, Nau being one of them, came together in an industry-wide collaborative effort to build an open source, business-to-business tool that would evaluate a product’s overall environmental impact.

Wow. That sounds like a lot of work.
It is. But that’s not all. Last year, the world’s largest apparel companies—like Walmart and Target and others representing up to 50% of the apparel world—formed the Sustainable Apparel Coalition and approached OIA to join efforts in building a larger, more comprehensive tool that would be scalable for both small and large companies. So, ultimately, we had to find consensus from a long list of participants.

But, keep in mind, we are creating an industry-wide tool based on shared values of sustainability and conservation, the same values that have driven the outdoor industry since the beginning. And we are creating a common language across supply chains and manufacturing so that everyone is judged by the same standards.

It’s great in theory, but how does it work?
A product will be evaluated across its product lifecycles using the lenses of land use, water, waste, greenhouse gases and energy. Of course, this is a lot to think about, especially for companies just beginning the process, so we suggest starting with one aspect of your business, like packaging and integrating these small changes into your everyday business.

Makes sense, but what’s Nau got to do with this massive undertaking? And how is it going to affect the way things are run around here?
Well, I’ve been deep in the trenches of developing the content of the tool alongside my colleagues from REI, Patagonia, Timberland, Columbia, North Face and Mountain Equipment Co-op. And, essentially, it will allow us to have a deeper level of understanding of our products so that we’re always improving, progressing and evaluating the way thing are done. It’s going to allow us to make forward progress with our goals in sustainability, goals that we had no way to quantify before.

So we’re all going to be on the same playing field? Nau, Nike, REI and Walmart?
Yep, we will all be asking the same questions.

But this is a B2B tool, so what does it mean for the consumer?
For businesses, it will allow transparency in the way products are designed and built. For consumers, it’s a building block that allows them to trust our brand. And who knows, in time, it might just become a consumer-facing label.

And when is the debut of this ground-breaking tool?
Hopefully, we will pilot the tool in September using some of our own key products to evaluate the tool and give feedback before its official launch.

So this is really happening?
Oh yeah. You better believe it.

Next month, in part two of our three-part-series, we’ll take a deeper dive into the Eco Index and find out how a few of our key styles size up when put to the test.

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Toms revealed their new One for One™ product yesterday: Sunglasses. We’ve always been big supporters of the Toms mission and the aesthetic of their simple shoes, so the idea of buying a pair of shades and helping a person with a vision disability sounds great to us. The models are as versatile and classic as the footwear line, and we really love the simple brand identifier on the arm of the glasses—painted lines, which almost bring to mind resin-dip paint jobs on surfboards. The design, according to company founder Blake Mycoskie, will remind the wearer that she has help a person in need to be able to see. Our favorite pair is the Classic 101, shown above.

Well done, Toms!

We’re finally getting a few sunny days in Portland. It’s Friday afternoon and our minds are drifting to post-work brews somewhere outside. And—wouldn’tcha know it?—we stumbled across a video that validates our decision to enjoy one of our favorite local beers. It turns out that Windmer Brothers is making wooden beer taps out of local salvaged trees. Not only is the video of the process mesmerizing, but it’s also a small symbol of a big company’s efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle.

Is it happy hour yet?

This week our textile guru, Jamie Bainbridge reveals the ingredients to the ultimate  “fabric sandwich” and dives deep into the knitty gritty of dot matrix lamination. As our fabric goddess (part scientist, part artiste), she has had a hand in every style we make.  Prepare to get smart…

For Spring, we have a few new fabrics that we’re introducing, like in the Gust Wind Shirt….

Jamie Bainbridge: That’s a 2-ply woven fabric that is actually two separate fabrics that are woven together in spots. So it’s a like a two-layer sandwich of fabric that is 100% recycled polyester. It has a yarn-dyed plaid on one side and a yarn-dyed check on the other side.

What about the Wafer Pullover? It’s so incredibly lightweight.

The fabric for our men’s and women’s Wafer Pullover is a very fine gauge knit recycled poly. In fact, the machinery that produces this knit probably came around about ten years ago. It’s the finest gauge knit you can do, making a very wind-resistant and tight face to the fabric. But you can still get a lot of stretch out of it – it’s a 4-way stretch – because it’s a knit. Read More »

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure…or in this case, Kitchen. Working with found, inherited, re-purposed and salvaged materials, John Preus and Charlie Roderick of Dilettante Studios in Chicago created this beautiful kitchen with a minimum of virgin materials.

What developed was a composition based largely on the primary components, a walnut cabinet from the Rebuilding Exchange, and the various colors of aged lumber that we were able to accumulate- douglas fir floor joists, cedar fencing, walnut doors and panels, pine shelving, both natural and painted white.

Perhaps what’s most inspiring, though, is the attitude behind their design, which views the choice of raw materials not as a sacrifice, but an incitement to creativity. “We do our best to go second-hand whenever possible,” they say, “as both a principle and an invited opportunity for adaptive design.”

Their portfolio is full of stuff like this; check it out.

Here’s a true story that Jamie, our director of textile development and sustainability, told me today:

Back in 2008, Darrell Meyers, an associate at a Wal-Mart in North Carolina, was on a break and noticed that in all the vending machines in the break room were lit up. Inside each one, he realized, there was a light bulb sucking power 24 hours a day. He thought about how much electricity was wasted and wondered how much money the company could save by taking the lights out of all the vending machines.

Now, while Wal-Mart may catch a lot of flack for many things, missing an opportunity to save money isn’t one of them. So when Darrell’s idea got back to corporate headquarters, they ran some numbers and figured out that Wal-Mart could save more than $1 million every year by taking out the bulbs. One million dollars.

You can find all that proudly trumpeted on WalMart’s own site. What they don’t mention are the energy savings. A 25 watt bulb on 24-hours a day, running on coal-generated electricity, will result in around 460lbs of CO2 being released into the atmosphere per year per bulb. A back-of-the-envelope calculation (four bulbs per machine, 4 machines per Wal-Mart, 8,400 Wal-Marts) would suggest that just unplugging those bulbs reduced Wal-Mart’s carbon footprint by some 61.8 million pounds of CO2.

So what does that tell us? Wal-Mart didn’t make this change to save the planet; they did it to save money. But they only really noticed it because they’re big enough to save a million dollars by unplugging some bulbs. However, that doesn’t mean the same kind of numbers-based thinking doesn’t apply to us as individuals. While things like changing your lightbulbs (or, another great example, sealing your windows) may seem less sexy than solar panels and hybrid cars, they are far more impactful, and scale far more quickly. It’s the low hanging fruit, and it’s time we picked it.

[TruckFarm, and its founders Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney, are the 2010 recipients of our $10,000 Grant For Change. They sent us this update from the road, where they're growing and educating on the go. Learn more about the farm, and their upcoming film, at their website, truck-farm.com - Ed.]

It’s been a busy month for TRUCK FARM!

On October 19th , we participated in a small fundraiser for our friends at New Amsterdam Market, a new outdoors market near the Old Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan. For the fundraiser, Truck Farm produce was part of a festive autumn meal held in a small restaurant in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Ian Cheney gave a short presentation about the film & food project to a dozen invited guests.

A week later, Ian brought the truck to an after-school program at a local public school in Brooklyn, where kids tasted the truck?s sage, basil, tomatoes, arugula and other treats, before heading off to begin planting their own vegetables in an indoor greenhouse.

On Friday, November 5th, we were invited to share a sneak preview of the film TRUCK FARM at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, as part of their Food for Tomorrow symposium. The event was an enormous success; Truck Farm musician-in-residence Simon Beins played a set of music before the show, and several hundred people joined for the screening itself, which was followed by a cocktail reception in one of the museum’s Halls of Invention.

Returning back to New York City, we are now putting the final touches on TRUCK FARM the film, and we’re pleased to find our first saffron crocus emerging from the chilly November soil!

Every year, the US consumes about 100 Quadrillion (that’s twelve zeros, or a million billions) BTUs of energy. Wondering where all that energy comes from? Check out this handy infographic from our friends at GOOD, who took a look at why everything is bigger in Texas (including the energy consumption) and why New York might have the very lowest consumption per capita (Metrocard, anyone?)

For those taking climate change seriously, it’s an excellent primer on how we use our carbon-based energy economy—and where we need to focus on making change.

(via GOOD)