California Apparel News

You want to become more environmentally friendly in your apparel production. You want to offer your customers an organic, fair-traded product that demonstrates your company’s commitment to bettering the world’s ecological and social landscape. Producing 100 percent organic cotton separates will not make much of a statement, however, if your buttons are newly minted plastic, your studs are plated metal, and your hangtags are virgin paper.

Going green takes, as they say, a village—of component resources and findings and trimmings suppliers, among others—who are like-minded. Thankfully, a number of companies today servicing the apparel industry are making similar moves to attempt to reduce their carbon footprints and produce more ecologically friendly products. Some component producers weigh in on the pros—and controversies—of going green.

Avery Dennison Corporation

Jeff Knapton has the interesting title of Director of Sustainability for the Pasadena, Calif.–based Avery Dennison Corporation, global producer of pressure-sensitive technology, including labels and hangtags for the apparel industry. “It really is the convergence of three key elements: environmental in terms of waste and energy reduction—water, climate, air, and land; social responsibility for labor standards and community involvement; and corporate citizenship and ethics.”

Knapton is working to reduce Avery Dennison’s carbon footprint producing hangtags, labels, and assorted packaging—a complicated process that is both exciting in its innovation and fraught with pitfalls.

“Our product greening portfolio is still relatively small compared to the business,” Knapton says, “but it has exploded since last March or April.” The company started about a year and a half ago using recycled paper stock as well as sustainable paper sources, all Forest Stewardship Council–certified from the company’s five China facilities for its hangtags and price tickets. It offers recycled hangtag strings and eco-friendly materials such as recycled polyester, organic cotton, and bamboo for its woven and printed fiber labels.It has also developed a biodegradable polybag for shipping that is built to decompose in nine months to five years compared with 100 to 500 years for regular polybags.

Still, he explains, the science is very young, and the problems are many, including strength, weave-ability, and seal-ability issues with some of the more ecologically desirable materials. And then there is the cost.“All of the raw materials streams tend to be more expensive,” Knapton says. Bottom line, any eco-friendly product “has to perform, and it needs to make sense economically and technically, and aesthetically.”

Usually when I do a session with a company, I tell them, ’This is what sustainability is. There are a lot of trade-offs here. Do you know what your mission statement is?’ It really is an eye-opener for a lot of people. They are hoping they will have a solution they can implement right after the meeting. That is not how this works. It takes a cultural commitment from the top down, and it can’t be done for PR reasons only. That’s where the backlash can come.”

Still, Knapton says, with some major retailers starting to demand 25 percent packing reduction and zero waste product, Avery Dennison, which posts its own environmental mission statement on its website, has 100 research scientists around the world “looking at many different things” involving hemp, soy, silk, and corn. Some of the simplest steps include integrating labels so that one has two functions, downsizing the tags themselves, using thinner paper stock and fewer weaving threads. Heat transfers, on plastic film carriers that can be recycled, are another attractive alternative.

And it is worth it to a company. “Price, fit, and fashion drive the market, but environmental concern is growing most rapidly,” Knapton says. Brand identification “is the vehicle to communicate what you are doing to contribute to sustainability.”It’s an evolution,” Knapton says. “This is a very viable area in terms of products. We don’t think it’s a fad. It’s here to stay, and it is the future. We’re embracing it to make it viable for our clients.” Zia River Corporation

Susan Heller is bemused by the increasing number of calls she now receives for “natural materials” at her nearly 20-year-old Zia River Corporation and its button lines, Renaissance Buttons and Blue Moon Buttons.

“At least half of our product line is natural material,” she says, “but it always has been. It’s a natural aesthetic, a touch-and-feel kind of thing that has always been our focus.” Heller, who once repped Native American artists, and husband Leonard Denison, who was in the art gallery service business, began Zia River Corporation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the late 1980s when Ralph Lauren Polo contacted them for reproduction Navajo-style metal buttons for its Southwest look. Now located near Durango, Colo., Zia River concentrates much of its sizable stock on handcrafted, artisan-produced natural buttons culled from around the world.

The materials are either from renewable resources—antlers shed annually by elk and deer, Pacific Basin coconut shell, South American tagua nuts—or recycled product such as vintage shell buttons once bountifully produced in the Mississippi delta area until the plastics revolution of the 1950s stole the business, and recycled glass from Ghana, which villagers break up, melt down, and make into buttons. Zia River still produces metal buttons, but only stamped nickel and brass with no harmful plating process, plus a line of non-leaded pewter.

New customers come with questions, some misinformation, and agendas. “One of the things they want to know, and we aren’t getting into, is whether our sources are certified by this group or that,” Heller says. “We get our stuff from small craftspeople all over the world, and they don’t have the resources to get themselves certified. We are eco-friendly in a number of our products, and they need to decide if that’s enough for them.”

Still, Zia River has increased its stock of “large natural coconut buttons in bright colors that are just luscious,” and Heller finds there is “a lot more activity with tagua nut buttons,” which come principally from Ecuador, whose durability, beautiful grain, and ability to take sophisticated dye have gained them new appreciation. “And that may preserve those forests,” Heller adds, “because it makes the trees more valuable if the buttons are in demand.

“We’re getting a lot of designers and manufacturers looking at us who never looked at us before,” Heller says. “It’s not that we’ve changed, the market has changed. We will stay true to ourselves.” QST Corporation

“As people became more aware of global warming, it seemed a natural progression for us as well the last couple of years,” says Kirk Johnson, pocketing manager for the 130-year-old Chicago-based QST Corporation, producer of apparel components including elastics and construction fabrics for pocketing and interfacings. “And now, the larger retailers are starting to require that manufacturers be more green, more earth-friendly. We are getting more calls all the time.”

QST, convinced two years ago that organics were an idea whose time had come, made “a conscious effort to get product out there and get feedback from people,” Johnson says.

Today, QST offers four different products in their organics line: a 100 percent domestic organic cotton; a 50/50 blend of 100 percent organic cotton and Repreve recycled polyester; a 50/50 blend of 100 percent organic cotton and bamboo; and a 50/50 blend of 100 percent organic cotton with Ecospun, a post-consumer waste recycled polyester.

While organic elastic is not a reality, QST can provide elastic made from recycled polyester. “Most of my accounts have either sampled these or are presenting them to their clients,” Johnson reports. “There are a few different things that come into play. Do the products still meet the requirements, and not create another problem in the end? Will the consumer pay? Giving them a green product at a price point that works is difficult to do.”

Johnson is working to convince his customers of the worthiness of the effort and expense. He is developing presentations that will make the production chain transparent, showing QST products’ lifecycles from farm to weaving and finishing mills. “Making, shipping, warehousing—we try to look at everything,” he says. “Anybody can just say they’re organic. We’re trying to establish credibility.” Appropriate organic certifications from the growers are presented as well.“We’re in the learning-curve time, just trying to figure out what product is the most important, what price point will make it,” Johnson says. “I think it’s definitely the future, and I think as long as global warming is in the news, it’s going to become more and more important. As technology catches up, then hopefully prices will come down.”