Are Upcycled Fabrics a Good Choice for Company Merch?

When you're looking into company merchandise, you have a lot of options for the base materials, even before you decide on a design.

The easiest option is to simply buy something new from the cheapest supplier you can find. This presents a number of challenges, primarily centered around sustainability and the ethics of production, but it at least saves you some direct expenses.

You can also go with more sustainably produced apparel. For example, when you get t-shirts from us, they're made using locally-grown cotton, locally produced textiles, and local production methods. It's all verifiably more sustainable and ethical (which is why we offer it) and provides numerous benefits to the environment.

Another option, though, is to avoid any newly-produced fabrics entirely. It's called upcycled apparel, and it's growing in popularity as a sustainable and circular option in fashion. While we don't currently offer any upcycled apparel, it's definitely something worth talking about, so we figured we'd dig in and discuss the trend.

What Are Upcycled Fabrics?

To start discussing upcycled fabrics and upcycled apparel, we need to talk a little about circularity.

Consider the traditional life cycle of a product. Raw materials are grown, mined, or otherwise produced, a process that causes emissions and often damage to the environment. These materials are shipped (more emissions) to facilities that convert them into secondary materials (even more emissions). Think steel ingots or reams of fabric. These are then shipped again (yet more emissions) to other facilities that process them and turn them into products (you got it, more emissions).

From there, the products are purchased and shipped, either to retailers or to customers. Retailers sell them to customers. Customers use them until they reach the end of their useful lifespan. That could be a matter of minutes if they're consumables or a matter of years for high-quality apparel, but it eventually happens.

What happens to those products when they're no longer useful? Most of the time, they're simply discarded. They end up in landfills or, worse, in our waters. It's not great!

This is a description of a traditional linear production chain. Circularity is a redevelopment of the entire production chain, meant to take those products when they're no longer useful and recycle them back into the start of the supply chain.

In the case of fabrics, it means taking discarded apparel – whether it's people getting rid of last year's fashion or people who have worn their clothes to the point of falling apart – and reusing parts of the fabric as much as possible.

It's also very important to point out that discarded apparel isn't solely a consumer problem. Millions of tons of apparel are just clothing that remains unsold past the trend of its fashion, and it's destroyed and discarded rather than returned and recycled. Virtually all of this could potentially be recycled or upcycled.

Upcycling vs Recycling Apparel

Speaking of, there's an important distinction to make here between upcycling and recycling. Both are parts of a good circular system, but they function in different ways.

Recycling is the process of taking waste products, processing them into new materials, and using those to create new products. Metal can easily be recycled into new metal products, and plastics can be processed into new plastics for some (limited) uses.

Upcycling is a little different. It's the process of taking the discarded material and repurposing it into something new and, ideally, more valuable than the waste products. Old denim jeans can be cut into patches and sewn into bags and things like that. Even old fabrics that aren't repurposable that easily can be shredded into insulation for quilted items.

Broadly speaking, the key to recycling is that it involves a material or chemical change to the base products being recycled, while upcycling doesn't.

What Are the Benefits of Upcycled Apparel?

Upcycling has a lot of benefits, most of which are most visible at the macro level. What do we mean? Well, just look at the benefits themselves.

There's less reliance on virgin materials. If millions of tons of fabrics and apparel are produced every year, and millions of tons are discarded, including significant amounts that are never actually purchased or used for their intended purpose, that's a lot of unnecessary waste. If upcycling picks up, it removes some of those tons of material from the waste pile and uses them to replace virgin materials at the start of the supply line.

Since the production of virgin materials is a huge drain on the environment, from emissions to water use to chemical use, removing some of that production is a good thing. Likewise, removing materials from landfills – especially synthetic materials that account for huge amounts of environmental microplastics – is a good thing. It attacks the problem from both sides of the supply chain.

It's a solution for fabrics that can't normally be recycled. One of the issues with textiles is that mixed textiles – like cotton-polyester blends, which are very common – can't be recycled. There's no easy way to un-blend those fabrics, so it's not financially sound to do, so it doesn't get done. Upcycling, since it doesn't require that kind of base-level change to the materials, can be done with those kinds of fabrics.

Upcycling helps put pressure on bad social practices. The fashion industry is one of the most exploitative industries in manufacturing, so much so that the image of a "sweatshop" is one almost universally centered around making apparel. By reducing demand, especially from the most exploitative kinds of fashion, it helps make that kind of exploitation less viable.

What about benefits at the individual level? Are there benefits to you as a company using upcycled fabric apparel? What about benefits to your employees or customers who buy it?

Unfortunately, there's less in the way of tangible benefits here. The apparel will be more unique, so you can stand out from the crowd a bit better. It's also ethically better, environmentally better, and more sustainable. But, in terms of tangible use cases, it's not much different from other kinds of apparel.

Are There Drawbacks to Upcycled Fabrics?

Unfortunately, there are a few significant downsides to upcycled apparel, and they're more pronounced when you're trying to use the apparel for something like company merch.

There can be quality concerns.

Depending on the kind of materials being used in upcycling, some of them may be more worn out than others, might come from lower-quality base sources, or have other quality issues. This can lead to uneven wear and tear on upcycled items and premature failure of seams or other elements that may result in the items not lasting as long as non-upcycled apparel.

This depends a lot on the actual upcycling being done. A company that specializes in buying deadstock and upcycling it into newer, more fashionable items isn't going to have the same kinds of problems as a company that specializes in taking end-of-life discarded materials and repurposing them.

Supply can be inconsistent.

One of the biggest challenges is that upcycling in bulk isn't always possible. A lot depends on the materials being upcycled and the products being made, though. There's a limited – and inconsistent – supply of materials to use to create upcycled products. That means there may be effectively a hard limit on the number of items of a certain type that can be produced.

That's not to say you can't get enough of any given upcycled product. If all you want are, say, tote bags made of upcycled t-shirts, that's easily done. It's consistency in material, color, and design that falls short. You can alleviate some of that with chemical treatments, dyes, and re-printing, but that adds more to the upcycling process and can mitigate some of the good of the upcycling in the first place.

Upcycling is often labor-intensive.

A lot of kinds of upcycling involve labor-intensive processes like embroidery, applique, or careful combining of base materials. It's not something that can be easily mass-produced the way virgin materials are because the starting points vary.

This means the volume of items that can be produced is lower, the time it takes to produce them is higher, and the costs to have it all done are higher.

There's often a public perception issue.

Upcycling is most popular in individual products and uses. If you look up upcycled apparel, a lot of the time, it's individual fashion influencers making one-of-a-kind items, Etsy stores turning whole products into small accessories, and other very small-scale products.

There's a bit of a perception of upcycling as somehow cheap, or how it's "wearing trash," or other negativity surrounding it. It can be hard to overcome this impression, and if you're making upcycled merchandise part of your company image, you need to make sure it doesn't clash with the other impressions and goals you have with your branding.

There are relatively few corporate-scale suppliers of upcycled apparel.

This is perhaps the biggest challenge, and we've already touched on it, but for company merchandise, you often want scale. With upcycling, scale isn't always available. Most upcycling is still in the realm of individuals and hobbyists rather than corporate partners and industrial suppliers.

This means you'll need to work harder to find brands you can work with to supply your upcycled company merch. The companies out there might not want to further customize the items they make, or they might not suit your needs, or they might just not be able to supply the volume you need. Yet, you're limited in choice because relatively few suppliers even exist at all.

Potential abuse of upcycling.

One final small concern is that some unscrupulous companies might take advantage of upcycling to abuse their own production.

If a company buys deadstock to upcycle, the company selling the deadstock might simply overproduce to ensure they have that deadstock to sell. This both defeats the purpose of upcycling and mitigates some of the environmental and ethical benefits. Fortunately, it's also relatively rare, though it's something to watch for in the future.

Are Upcycled Fabrics Good for Company Merch?

Whether or not upcycled apparel is a good idea for your company merch comes down to what your company and brand image are.

If you're a brand that values ethics, sustainability, recycling, and individualization, upcycling can be a good option.

• You can promote more sustainability by directly contributing to pulling fabric waste from the landfill pipeline and converting it into usable items.
• You can build more emphasis into the circularity model of production and incorporate it into your messaging.
• You can build off the branding of more unique, limited-run items and drum up interest through the use of FOMO for your upcycled items.

All of these are potential avenues for benefit to your company, alongside benefit to the environment.

The downsides are things like customer education, where you may have to explain the difference between recycling and upcycling, provide more information to assuage the concerns of those who worry about quality control, and justify added expenses.

On the other hand, if your brand is more focused on global-scale ethics and big-picture sustainability, upcycling might not fit the bill at the same level. You're more likely to find benefit in investing in fairtrade, union-made, or cradle-to-cradle certified products instead. Even something like investing in union-made items can be more beneficial to more people simply because it's already more common and established.

And, of course, some brands don't want to focus on any of these benefits and just want something inexpensive to use as company merchandise. In these cases, upcycling is unlikely to fit the bill, as the added costs of labor and customization often add enough costs to make it not worth it from a purely financial perspective.

All of this combines into why we at Ethix don't currently offer upcycled apparel items. The volume isn't there to support what we want to offer. To be clear, though, there's nothing wrong with upcycled apparel when you can get it. It's not a case of pure greenwashing, and it does have tangible benefits; they just aren't the benefits we're after.

That said, we're keeping our eyes on upcycling. It's growing in popularity, and more and more companies are getting into the game at larger and larger scales. Once the infrastructure picks up and the scale increases, it's entirely possible we'll invest.