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Materials we love
GOTS Certified Organic Cotton
Unlike regular cotton, organic cotton is GMO free and uses no chemicals, toxic bleach, or formaldehyde to grow, harvest or process. All dyestuffs used are low impact fibre reactive or natural dyes. The benefit of GOTS certification is that it includes strict requirements around fair wages and treatment of workers and is much more traceable. Due to crop rotation, organic cotton is better on the soil and allows farmers to grow organic foods in the counter-season which can help feed them as well as provide additional income. Some people have claimed organic cotton uses more water than conventional, this might be true for the first 2-3 harvests, however after this the soil is much better equipped to retain water and sequester carbon than conventional cotton. Around 70% of organic cotton farms rely on rainwater alone to water their crops, where as larger, drier organic farms may still need to use irrigation. The end product (like this popular skivvy) is a traceable, biodegradable product of equal or higher quality than conventional cotton and, best of all, it’s gentle on your skin.
How could it be better?
Organic Cotton still uses a lot of water- albeit less than its conventional counterpart in most cases. A great alternative from a water saving perspective is Lenzing Certified Tencel.
GOTS Certified Organic Linen
This amazing fabric is nature’s secret weapon. Linen comes from the flax crop, a non-land monopolizing plant, which uses little water and encourages all sorts of bio-diversity. We source our linen from organic farms where it’s cultivated and grown. It’s pulled from the earth with care and left to sit outside for just the right amount of time where a process called retting occurs. This natural decomposition process allows for the fibre to be easily separated from the bark. While many others achieve this with a chemical process, our flax growers use traditional, non-chemical reliant techniques. During the scutching phase, the plants are rolled through fluted rollers. Once the fibres have emerged, they’re separated into long and short fibres. The longest ones are reserved for the finest linen garments, and the short ones are used for making sturdier goods.
Due to the low tensile nature of flax, threads can often break in the spinning and weaving process. If this occurs, the mill's technicians perform a “weaver’s knot” which is so tiny it’s undetected in the final product. Linen making is a preserved, ancient and artisanal skill. Check out this fan favourite shirt and experience organic linen for yourself. It's biodegradable, breathable and just cool. We love organic linen!
How could it be better?
We’d love to see more certified organic linen on the market. Although non-organic linen is pretty sustainable, it’s common for manufacturers to use chemicals during the retting process. Also CO2 outputs of a mill can be high. We work with a CO2 neutral mill that doesn’t use a chemical retting process.
Hemp
Hemp has been around for thousands of years. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that this industrial strength fabric became comfortably wearable, thanks to the discovery of an enzymatic process that removed the lignin from the fibre without compromising its strength.
Hemp is super durable, comfortable and holds its shape. It’s resistant to mould and UV light, plus it’s extremely water absorbent, which means it holds colour better than any other natural fibre. It has environmental advantages, too. It grows super fast, producing more fibre yield per acre than any other crop: 250% more than cotton fibre yield, 600% more than flax.
We think hemp is pretty special for all its wonderful qualities, you can see it in action in our lush scarves and limited edition pieces. We are constantly looking for more ways to incorporate hemp that meets our high standards of traceability.
How could it be better?
Hemp is notoriously expensive. It’s also very hard to find suppliers who are willing to offer traceability. Certified organic hemp is even rarer. There's also some dodgy math going on, with WAY more "hemp" sold globally than is produced. So we are treading carefully.
Recycled or RWS Traceable Merino
Merino that is non-mulesed is considered to be a much more ethical choice than unverified wool, however we require a lot more clarity around the origin and treatment of the animal for us to begin using this wonderful fibre in our garments. After three years of searching, we've finally found some amazing, ethically aligned, local farmers who we can work with directly while keeping almost all of our supply chain local. Additionally this wool is certified by the Responsible Wool Standard (RWS) and some is grown on permaculture farms. The spinning of the wool must happen offshore in either China or New Zealand because we've lost the industry capability in Australia, but the rest, like the growing and even the knitting is done right here. A.BCH has committed to only working with wool when we can work directly with these local RWS farms or with wool that's been recycled or rescued.
How could it be better?
While non-mulsed wool is a good start, it doesn’t guarantee the fair treatment of the sheep. There’s no easy way to track how the animals are treated during the shearing process, for example, as well as the quality of their living conditions. We think the answer is to move away from industrial wool farms and towards small-scale local producers that treat their animals with dignity and respect, and have a lower environmental impact overall.
Australian Super Cotton
Ok, we are just going to say it. Australian grown cotton is some of the most sustainably grown cotton in the world. If you are shocked, we recommend you check out We Do Grow Here to learn about our journey to this conclusion. Get this. Australian cotton crops produce, on average, double the yield of the rest of the world, per hectare, with the same average amount of water. And while it may not be organic, the farms we work with are using organic cotton farming practises, like crop rotation and (very clever) natural pest management. We may just be getting started with ASC but you can watch this space, especially if spinning is re-shored in Australia. For now, we are working with small batches of cotton from a single farm in St George, QLD. The A.30 is our first style to be made with this single farm, 100% Australian supply chain jersey. And it is lush.
How could it be better?
At A.BCH we have generally steered clear of GMOs. There are a multitude of cautionary reasons why. The introduction of the expensive Monsanto owned seeds (Bt cotton) in countries that do not have the support, infrastructure and ongoing commitment to research and development can be, in our opinion, dangerous. Pests build resistance over time to pesticides, too, so the GM crop does not always result in a low-to-no pesticide usage. The Aussies do seem to have this under control, with plenty of scientific and industry support back it. With Australian crops hitting the high notes in so many other (sustainable) ways, the only thing left to improve would be to one day grow an equally high-yielding organic seed here and of course to have the mills based on-shore to spin the fibre into yarn. This would mean an unbroken, 100% Australian supply chain, drastically reduce CO2 emissions and a traceable to farm product.
Peace Silk
While we've never worked with silk, we haven't ruled it out entirely - if the right kind of silk came along and we felt we could add something unique. At A.BCH we commit to only ever purchase silk that is ethically extracted. 90% of the world’s silk production is obtained by gassing or boiling the silk worm alive in order to obtain its cocoon, which ensures an unbroken silk fibre. We’re not fans of that idea. Peace silk allows the silk worm to exit the cocoon before the silk is harvested.
We think that silk is a pretty special fabric, so it’s worth waiting for the stuff that’s kind to every living creature.
How could it be better?
The risk of child and forced labour remains high in silk production, especially in countries such as India. Not all silk is created equal and it’s important to us to thoroughly vet supply chains before purchasing silk - even peace silk, however the industry is notoriously opaque. So we're holding tight for now.
Tencel ®
Tencel is a cellulose-based fibre also known as Lyocell. The reason we use Tencel specifically is because it’s a registered trademark and certified fibre of Lenzing, an Austrian fibre innovator with high sustainability standards. We cannot speak for lyocell fibres in general, but there is a lot of information out there about Lenzing Tencel. You can see Tencel in garment-form in these much loved, summery shorts.
Tencel is one of those part natural, part man-made fibres, made from the wood pulp of eucalyptus trees and processed using a closed loop non-toxic chemical system. Lenzing produces around 50% of its wood pulp from European forests that are continually expanding in land mass. Most of their wood is grown in Austria, Germany and Czech Republic with a few other neighbouring European countries contributing. The other half is outsourced from long-standing partners around the world, which support conservation solutions and have been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.
Eucalyptus trees are an evergreen species that are fast growing, can be planted on marginal lands and require no water or pesticide use. The fibre yield is ten times higher than cotton and uses 100 times less water than cotton in its processing. The wood is pulped before water and a natural solvent are added to break down the fibres. The solvent is 99.9% reclaimed and reused in a closed loop process. The cellulose is then pushed through a spinneret that produce long strands of fibre, which is later spun into yarns and finally knitted or woven into a textile. Lenzing’s production process takes place in their C02 neutral factory. The end result is incredibly soft, hypo-allergenic and biodegradable and if you want to know more, we wrote a whole blog post on Tencel here.
How could it be better?
While Tencel is much less thirsty than cotton, it still requires wood pulp to create it. Lenzing’s forests are supposed to be managed sustainably but switching to wood based feedstock for a majority of fibres could become problematic. In 2019, 6.4% of the world’s fibre production was produced from wood-based cellulose. It's super important to keep this in context and we always need to utilise a balanced mix of textiles. There is no “perfect fibre” and the world couldn’t sustainably switch all its clothing production to Tencel without seeing significant de-forestation. Read more on these kinds of fibres here.
Recycled Cellulose
Coming soon.
How could it be better?
Coming soon.
rPET – use sparingly
When we started A.BCH in 2017, we were only able to produce our branded labels in synthetic materials. The best we could do at the time was to use recycled PET, an alternative to virgin polyester (which globally requires over 70 million barrels of oil per year to produce). The rPET manufacturing process uses about half the energy of virgin polyester at about half the carbon emissions. That said, it has a terrible afterlife projection and it was always a temporary solution for us. We've now developed a way to manufacture these labels in organic cotton and have transitioned over to the new material from A.31 garments onwards and as we use up the old labels pre-A.31 styles will eventually be organic cotton too. In general, rPET is better than virgin polyester, but we'd recommend only seeking it out in garments that MUST be synthetic for performance reasons and ideally don't require much (if any) laundering.
How could it be better?
A common misunderstanding is that when plastic is recycled, it returns back to the same quality it was in its virgin state (known as a “closed loop”). While it's technically possible, it's rarely the case. Each time polyester is melted down for the most common type of plastic recycling (mechanical recycling) it loses strength and quality and is often used for a lower quality purpose than it had originally. Currently PET (the plastic used to make single-use drink bottles) can be recycled into new, slightly lower quality plastic bottles with the highest possible quality being maintained. Polyester comes from PET too, but it's a much lower quality version of PET than what you find in, say, a plastic bottle. So when you use rPET to make what is known as recycled polyester, you aren't really fixing a problem so much as making new ones downstream.
People commonly believe that using rPET in clothing is somehow "saving" plastic bottles from landfill, when in fact, it's just putting pressure on an already established recycling system for PET and taking feedstock from the same pile that plastic bottles would be. And, once those 10 plastic bottles become a pair of leggings, those leggings can't ever become a bottle again. This means the bottles have been downcycled and the likelihood of the leggings getting recycled ever again pretty much becomes 0.
There are a few exceptions, with increasingly advanced chemical recycling technology, like that of Tintex and Unifi who have developed closed loop models where quality can be maintained in regeneration. Sadly, this is incredibly expensive and virtually inaccessible to the wider industry and you can't just ship your random leggings to these companies to be reclaimed. Another thing to beware, the older and more worn polyester becomes, the more microfibres it sheds during laundering. Micro plastics are an ecological crisis and it doesn't matter whether the plastics are recycled or not, they are still making their way into the atmosphere, waterways and into the food chain.
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Materials we don't love
Conventional Cotton
Cotton is a natural fibre that in 2015 accounted for around 25.2% of the world’s fibre production. 20 million tons of cotton are produced each year in around 90 countries. What’s unnatural is the state of the cotton industry in the 21st century and how cotton is now considered the world’s “dirtiest” crop. This is due to the intense amount of chemicals and water used to grow and process cotton. Only 2.4% of the world’s cropland is cotton, however cotton consumes 24% of global sales for pesticides and 11% of global sales for insecticides. According to the World Health organisation, up to 20,000 deaths each year are caused by pesticide poisoning in developing countries. More bad news, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report that 67 million birds are unintentionally killed every year by pesticides in the USA.
Beyond that, cotton is incredibly thirsty. It can take over 20,000L to produce 1kg of cotton. To put it into perspective, that’s enough cotton to create one t-shirt and one pair of jeans. Unsustainable farming has already had a severe impact on large-scale ecosystems and river basin conservation around the world, including the Murray Darling River in Australia.
Organic cotton is a much better choice for bio-diversity, human health, farmer welfare and for our water sources, as it uses far less water and no chemicals to produce. When we can’t source organic cotton, (for example in our interlining), we opt for cotton over polyester as it is still a “cleaner” alternative to virgin AND recycled polyester from a carbon emissions perspective, and allows us to maintain a biologically circular product.
Synthetic/Natural Blends
Coming soon
Viscose & Rayon
Rayon is the oldest cellulose fibre and was developed as a cheap alternative to silk in the 1880s. There are several techniques used to make rayon, the viscose process being the most common. Essentially, viscose processing begins with wood pulp (similar to Tencel), which is treated with sodium hydroxide and carbon disulphide, converting it to a honey-coloured, highly viscous liquid (hence the name). The fluid is eventually pushed through a spinneret and put into a chemical bath of Sulphuric Acid, where it hardens.
Exposure to carbon disulphide can cause damage to our nervous system, while disposal of sodium hydroxide and sulphuric acid can be damaging to waterways and harmful to plants and animals. Any industry that uses sulphuric acid runs the risk of accidental leaks and many industrial plants do not dispose of it correctly. There’s simply not enough transparency in viscose manufacturing. Even if chemicals are reclaimed, they pose a serious risk when unregulated. Read more on that here.
Bamboo
While the bamboo plant is fantastic, it grows insanely fast and needs very little water, the viscose chemical process used to make bamboo fabric is seriously bad for the environment. We go into that in more detail in the viscose section above.
In the USA, marketers aren’t even allowed to label bamboo viscose products as bamboo anymore, because after the chemical process, there’s virtually no trace of bamboo left in the fibre. It would be like us marketing Tencel as 100% eucalyptus.
Bamboo Viscose is the allowed terminology, but many people in the industry are still bamboozled, and there are no such restrictions for labelling in Australia. Beware when bamboo fabric is marketed as eco-friendly and hypoallergenic among other things. Sadly, it just isn’t the case. The source is fantastic, the process not so.
The only two kinds of bamboo fabric we’d consider good guys include “Bamboo linen”, which is produced using natural enzymes to break down fibres. On the downside, it’s apparently extremely labour intensive, and near impossible to find. "Bamboo lyocell" is also ok with us, which uses the same process as Tencel or in general terms, lyocell (a closed loop, cellulose fibre). However, regardless of the source (bamboo, eucalyptus, beech) the end product is correctly termed "lyocell" and contains no more bamboo than viscose bamboo, which is none, by the way.
Polyester
Oil derived synthetic fibres, including polyester, along with other synthetics now make up over 62.1% of the world’s fibre production. Yikes. It takes around 70 million barrels of oil every year just to feed humanity's addiction to polyester clothing. Besides the greenhouse gases and heavy use of crude oil, once polyester is made, it will most likely never break down, which contributes to mass landfill and, yup…more greenhouse gasses.
Polyester is cheap to make and has a lot of useful technical properties, but is it really worth it? With so much plastic in the world already and production expected to quadruple by 2050 you'd think we'd have at least figured this whole recycling thing out by now. Unfortunately only 5% of the world's plastics are recycled effectively and at least 8 million tonnes of plastic are "leaked" into our oceans annually. That's like dumping a full garbage truck of plastic into the ocean every minute. Yikes. It seems even laundering our polyester clothes is bad, as micro-filaments are shed each wash and end up in our waterways, posing a real threat to fish, birds and other sea life.
Many people have allergies or skin reactions to synthetic fabrics, which is another reason to steer clear of it. Sometimes you can’t avoid using polyester, so get on board with recycled polyester instead and give the environment a mini-break.
Nylon, Acrylic and other synthetics
The global apparel industry manufactures over 400 billion square metres of fabric per year, and the figure keeps on growing. Imagine enough material to cover the state of California each year. Unlike natural fibres, synthetic fibres begin their life as a petroleum or natural gas. They are man-made fibres, created via chemical reaction between petroleum by-products and various chemical substances. The fluid that is manufactured is pushed through spinnerets to make fibres. Each chemical process is slightly different, however, all involve the use of oil, gas or coal and output tonnes of energy and greenhouse gases.
Some examples of synthetic fibres include Polyester, Nylon, Acrylic, Spandex, Acetate and Elastane. Chemical “residue” such as formaldehyde is often left in these fabrics. The dyeing process is also more bad news. As natural and low-impact dyes cannot be used in synthetic fibres, petrochemical dyes and dye fixatives are used for colour which are extremely difficult to dispose of sustainably. The result is often dumped, untreated petrochemical dyestuffs and heavy metals that runoff into community waterways.
When it comes to synthetic fabrics, it’s a “No Thank You” from us.
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