How sustainable is my unisuit?

Unisuits, AOIs, singlets, lycras – there are many words for this staple of any rowers’ wardrobe. Love it (or if you’re a non-rower, loathe it), how sustainable is our kit? 

Google searches for sustainable activewear were up 151% in 2020, suggesting this is an issue many people are interested in. The clothing and footwear industries combined account for more than 8% of annual global climate impacts according to Quantis; similarly, the total greenhouse gas emissions related to textile production is more than the emissions from all international flights and maritime shipping trips combined. 

Sports manufacturers have focused on materials and designs which provide a competitive edge, but this can mean the environmental impact is neglected. Traditionally, activewear is manufactured from synthetic fabrics such as nylon, polyester, and spandex. While lightweight and sturdy, these are non-biodegradable and use huge amounts of water and energy in production.

Take the cricket shirt, for example. The Platform for Accelerating Sustainable Innovation in Cricket (PASIC) carried out a study in 2021. For a single polyester cricket shirt, 5.5kg of CO₂ emissions are produced, equivalent to driving a car for 22.2 km. 

Love it (or if you’re a non-rower, loathe it), how sustainable is our kit? 

There are 5 main stages in the production of a garment, each with potential for pollution:

1. Material: natural fibres from plants and animals (farming, irrigating, fertilising, harvesting) vs synthetic fibres (derived from fossil fuels)
2. Production: bleaching, dying and printing
3. Transport: emissions from transportation
4. Use: washing and drying of clothes using electricity. The washing of polyester-based clothes contributes to rising levels of microplastics in oceans

What are the potential solutions?

• Quality: avoid fast fashion, making products that last and so won’t need to be replaced as frequently
• Sustainable materials: switching from non-biodegradable materials to more sustainable options. For example, EFL League Two football team Forest Green Rovers was recognised by FIFA as the “world’s greenest football club”, having used recycled coffee bean waste and bamboo to make their strip.
• Local sourcing: to reduce transportation costs and emissions.

Is recycled polyester actually environmentally friendly?

A common theme across the companies is a reference to recycled polyester. Indeed, in the wider athletics market, Adidas and Reebok have pledged to replace all virgin polyester (PET) with recycled polyester (rPET) by 2024.

Recycled polyester reduces plastics being disposed of after a single use, often ending up in the oceans. This reduces the need for virgin fibres. 

However, they still release microplastics during washing. Because microplastics measure less than 5mm in length, they pass into water sources through sewage. 

Similarly, when plastic is recycled into textiles, they are no longer recyclable, unlike if they are recycled back into plastic.

Francois Souchet from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation put it bluntly: ‘Our reliance on polyester needs to be reduced, absolutely.’

Rival Kit

I spoke with Ryan Morrison, one of the founders of Rival Kit, about the brand’s ethos around sustainability.

Have you noticed that consumers are becoming more conscious of the environmental impact of sportswear and how are you, as a brand, tailoring your kit to meet that need?

Yeah, definitely. I was a consumer up until four years ago when I started the company. So, I was definitely one of those people that was looking for that sort of stuff. 

One of the reasons for the brand is to do one-at-a-time manufacturing so that you don’t have any waste. I think the biggest contributor to textile waste is not so much the type of textiles that you use but the lifecycle of the garment itself. There are massive amounts of carbon wasted by overproduction, which a lot of brands in our space tend to do; they like to buy lots of blanks and then customise them, whereas we only make what we need.

 We’re also using more sustainable fabrics, but we’re being careful about the fabrics that we use and how those fabrics are treated. A massive issue at the moment is greenwashing. I’m sure you’re aware, for example, about a big craze recently about recycled polyester leggings. They sound great but they’re not actually super great because you can infinitely make water bottles out of water bottles but as soon as you mix it with nylon, that’s the polyester wasted and at the end of the life cycle of that garment, unless you create a new technique, it’s extremely hard to get the nylon out of the polyester to recycle again.

At the moment, we’re only using recycled polyester that’s 100% from previous polyester garments. We’re not using recycled polyester-nylon for the simple reason that it’s effectively greenwashing.

In your supply chains, what kind of manufacturers do you use? And how do you monitor their environmental impact?

I’ve actually visited quite a lot of them, which I’m not sure many brands would be able to say. We look at a lot of very simple things. Firstly, we look at human sustainability, like nice working conditions, fair pay and being paid on time.

Then we look at where they’re getting their fabrics from. Quite often, the actual manufacturer itself doesn’t produce a lot of carbon or waste, it’s the secondary and tertiary suppliers. For our direct suppliers, those are really the main things we looked at.

And then we also spoke to their suppliers and just made sure that the fabrics that they were supplying were what they said they were and were sustainably sourced. That’s how we came onto only using recycled polyester garments because after speaking to these suppliers, they weren’t necessarily pushing recycled polyester-nylon.

In terms of transportation and emissions from that, do you have a particular geographical area for manufacturers?

No, we don’t. We do manufacture all around the world, which does have a high carbon footprint in terms of transport. What we do to offset that though is we use carbon offset for our transport, which is actually a standard feature for quite a lot of shipping agents at the moment.

DHL, for example, has a simple button that you can tick to offset the carbon for that shipment. We use DPD as well for our shipping domestically and they again do that.

So I think that overall our company produces very little in carbon waste.

Obviously with offsetting, it is going to be in the future. Have you considered moving manufacturing to the UK or do you think the cost is just too high?

It’s not actually even the costs, it’s just that the expertise isn’t there and that’s something I’m not big enough to fix.

For example, we were trying to make a wool product for the Boat Race and I tried to buy British wool for it. But it was genuinely impossible to buy at the scale that we needed it so we then had to look to Europe, which was kind of upsetting because you want to use British products.

I would love manufacturing to be in Britain and quite a lot of our garments are finished in Britain. But, at the moment, it’s not feasible with a lot of the different types of products because we offer such a massive range of products.

In terms of production, obviously, you mentioned only producing when the order comes in rather than bulk buying and then customising from there. Do you think that your customers are willing to accept longer lead times for a more sustainable product?

It’s something that we are really struggling with because we started off super fast and then we had the pandemic, and we then grew so much and we had a lot of production problems with that scaling. So it’s been a challenge that we’ve been facing.

I would suggest that they are not [happy to have longer lead times]. They kind of want both. Maybe that’s just our messaging and that’s something I’ve been speaking a lot about – about how we communicate our unique way of working and sustainable fabrics. 

There was a big shortage of recycled fabric during the pandemic because that boosted everyone’s athleisure wear and that meant Nike and Adidas were buying everything! But’s it’s difficult to explain that to the general population.

In my experience, consumers want the supplier to fix that. I would say that people put speed very near the top of their wish list.

A similar question about cost, it will obviously cost more to produce a higher quality product that will last longer, are people willing to pay more?

Again, it’s very hard to say because we do get quite a lot of price push back, especially because our main market is universities. They do care about sustainability, but they also care about price and speed. Basically, our target is to blend all three and compromise none, which is really hard.

Going forward, are there any new materials in the pipeline or other changes you’d like to be able to make in the next five years?

Now we’ve got over our operational issues with scaling, we’ve got some pretty exciting sustainability projects in the works. One of them is an “End of Life” scheme. We’re working on a structure where people can send used stuff back to us and working out what we then do with them. We’ve got some pretty developed ideas on that, but we just need it to be a bit more polished before we start announcing it.

About The Author