Garbage Sweatshirt

Name: Garbage Sweatshirt
Brand: Vollebak
SKU: SWH047GRNXSM
Price: 103.00 USD
Availability: InStock

Built with cotton that was heading to the dump, and stitching made from plastic bottles.

$345.00 $103.00

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Model is 6ft 2 / 189cm with a 40 inch / 101cm chest, and wears size Large.

Material made from fabric scraps
Stitching made from recycled plastic bottles
Soft and comfortable

Every single second, a garbage truck’s worth of clothing is dumped into landfill somewhere on Earth. So if we want to avoid trashing our planet, we have to start figuring out how to re-use the stuff we already have.

That’s why the Garbage Sweatshirt started with a very simple idea. What if garbage isn’t garbage? What if it’s simply pre-assembled raw materials that we can use to make new things. Designed to help rethink the role that garbage will play in Earth’s future, the Garbage Sweatshirt takes materials that were destined to spend the next few centuries on a rubbish pile, and transforms them into something new. Built with cotton that was headed to the dump and stitching made from plastic bottles, it’s a soft sweatshirt made from two of the largest waste streams on Earth.

Technical Details

Material made in Portugal: 50% recycled cotton, 50% organic cotton

Stitching is 100% recycled polyester

Material certified by the Global Recycled Standard

Material weighs 385g/m2

Sweatshirt weighs 530 grams

Machine wash 30°C

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Landfill can become a source of raw materials

Around 100 billion new pieces of clothing are made each year. And by 2050 that number is likely to double. At the same time over 150 tons of clothing are dumped in landfill every minute. So if we want to change that we need to start figuring out how to make new clothes from the stuff we already have. While lots of the materials we work with start life in a cutting-edge lab or out in nature, the Garbage Sweatshirt comes from two huge piles of trash.

Part of our Garbage range

Every piece in our Garbage range is made from stuff the world threw away. But while our Garbage Sweater and Jacket are built from old bulletproof vests and firefighter suits – which are some of the toughest and most challenging materials in the trash – the Garbage Sweatshirt takes a different approach. Instead, it re-uses the most common materials the world throws away. Because if waste streams are going to become a viable source of raw materials, then we have to tackle the biggest ones too.

Wear it like a regular sweatshirt

While the Garbage Sweatshirt is made from scrap material you wouldn’t know it. It feels just as soft and comfortable as a normal cotton sweatshirt. So you can wear it on its own, as your outer layer, or as part of a layering system in colder temperatures.

Half the sweatshirt is made from recycled cotton

Around 75% of all clothes in the world contain cotton. And even though cotton biodegrades, it’s also one of the most commonly found materials in landfill as only a fraction of today’s clothes get recycled. So we intercept cotton that was headed to the dump and use it to build half of the Garbage Sweatshirt.

How we actually make fabric out of garbage

The Garbage Sweatshirt starts life as piles of fabric scraps left over from the manufacturing processes of other brands’ clothes. These piles are sorted by colour before being cut into smaller pieces, shredded, cleaned and turned into new fibre. To create the sweatshirt’s colour we mix three different coloured piles. Light green, dark green and black scraps are blended together to create the marled texture you see on the surface of the sweatshirt.
Recycling cotton isn’t easy

The challenge with recycling cotton is making sure it’s still durable after you’ve shredded it to pieces in a grinding machine. Even with the most advanced technology, this process weakens the cotton fibres. So we currently have to combine our recycled cotton with some new fibre to make it strong again.
Combined with organic cotton

The other half of the sweatshirt is made from soft organic cotton that’s grown using natural solutions in place of artificial fertilisers and toxic chemicals. This helps to maintain soil health, conserve water and promote biodiversity.

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Stitched together with old plastic bottles

The sweatshirt is then stitched together with thread made entirely out of recycled polyester. Around 60% of all clothing in the world is made with synthetic fibre. And the majority of that is polyester. Unlike cotton it doesn’t biodegrade as it’s a plastic. Which means that once it ends up in landfill it can take centuries to break down. So rather than creating new plastics to create new clothes, we re-use plastic that already exists, by extracting it from old plastic bottles.

How we make thread from plastic bottles

The plastic bottles we use go through a similar mechanical process to the cotton. Bales of crushed PET bottles are shredded and cleaned to make tiny flakes which are melted, spun and pulled through a machine to produce recycled polyester thread.
Produced at a cutting-edge recycling facility

We make our Garbage Sweatshirt with a factory in Portugal who are finding lots of innovative ways to create new things from waste. Their closed loop system dramatically reduces the consumption of water, energy and chemicals, with 40% of the facility’s energy coming from solar panels. State of the art machines process up to 600 tonnes of fabric waste each month. And every step of their process is carried out under one roof, from receiving truckloads of garbage right through to the creation of new material.
Excess garbage is turned into paper

Even when you recycle garbage there’s no guarantee it’s all going to be reusable. In cotton’s case, about 15% of the reprocessed fibres become too damaged to make new material. But rather than send it back to landfill our partner has invented a clever solution for the excess waste. They turn it into paper. The unusable cotton fibres are pulped and made into more than 400 tonnes of recycled paper each month.

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Where the future of clothing is going

There are three ways to tackle sustainable clothing. You can use advances in material technology to make clothes with a longer life expectancy than the people wearing them. You can go back to using nature to make clothes that require as little energy as possible and leave no trace of their existence at the end of their lives. Or you can start digging into waste streams to use the stuff people have already generated and discarded. With our 100 Year range, our Black Algae range, and our Garbage range, we’re now tackling all three routes at the same time.