54: Balancing sustainability with affordability Ankit Podcast

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54: Balancing sustainability with affordability

On The WTiN Podcast this week, we speak to Michael Cattanach, global product director at Polartec.

Jessica Owen
Hello. My name is Jessica Owen, and I am the Deputy digital editor at WTiN, and this is the WTiN podcast. Over the next few weeks, I'll be talking to organizations about the topic of textile recycling. This is one of the most important solutions to the industry's waste and sustainability problems. So tune in to learn about new industry initiatives to create circular fashion upcoming textile recovery technologies. How best to communicate sustainability to consumers and much more. This week, I am joined by Michael Cattanach, who is the Global Product Director at the fabric manufacturing company Polytech. Michael talks about the business's eco engineering initiative research into biopolymers and alternatives to spandex, and gives an honest opinion on the state of the industry and what's needed for sustainable change.

Hello, Michael. Good to talk to you again, and welcome to the WTiN podcast. How are you?

Michael Cattanach
I'm Well, Jessica, thanks. Pleasure to be here.

Jessica Owen
Good. Are you having a good start to the new year, or

Michael Cattanach
could start to the new year. It's not exactly freezing cold, snowy, wintery weather around Massachusetts, but there's good and bad with that. You can move around, but there's not snow for playing in, but we'll take it when it comes. Yeah,

Jessica Owen
funnily enough, we got some just yesterday. So I'm looking out the window, and it's about half a foot deep, which is quite unusual for where I am, but yeah, so polar tech, then that's why I've asked you here today. I've known of you guys for a couple of years now, but for those who aren't familiar with the company, do you mind just providing some background about what you do? Please? Sure,

Michael Cattanach
there's quite a long, storied history of politic. The original company goes back to early 1900s where there was a company called Malden Mills, who was a traditional New England textiles company that was dealing with World product making, kind of uniforms for First World War soldiers, all that kind of stuff. There's like a of the New England textile business, they had their had a serious downturn in the 20th century. So the story of the company through the 20th century has been ups and downs. Bit of a roller coaster, really. They were into upholstery fabrics. They were still doing flocked materials, still doing a lot of work with wool, still ventured into synthetics, you know, when, when that became popular. So we kind of fast forward through all that down to like 1980s where Malton Mills, the company, came up with a product called polar fleece. And it sounds kind of crazy to think about it. But fleece had to be invented at some point, right? It's completely ubiquitous now. But 1981 in fact, 40 years ago, was an invention of Paula fleece. So that was a product of Malden Mills at the time. Paula fleece then became polar tech. The companies are reoriented itself towards the new, growing sportswear market, particularly outdoor sports, and shed its legacy businesses and focused on defining the categories that we know and love today. So politech is the company that has been the case since, yeah, I don't know, like late 80s, early 90s, again, bit of a storied history. Through the 90s, dramatic financial situations, not helped by enormous fire in the factory in Massachusetts, the biggest industrial fire in England history. So all the way through to now, you know, we get to the point where Polytech has been introducing innovations into the market for like, for 40 years now, in fact, we're just about to embark on a 40 years of firsts, 40 years of fleece marketing campaign. Two years ago, we were purchased by Milliken company, which is a giant American Chemical and textile business, so that's given us greater stability, and we look forward to many more years of innovation. So yeah, it's quite a storied history and a fun one to have been involved in for the last 10 years here.

Jessica Owen
Yeah, definitely I wasn't aware of the fire, and actually how long you've been around. So that's quite interesting to hear if

Michael Cattanach
I were spectacular, some of the photographs and everything over are almost look like something from from a different age. You know, even though it's, it's only like 30 years ago. So it looks, it really looks so dramatic and old. It's like, oh my god, this is like something from the Industrial Revolution times, or something. But, yeah,

Jessica Owen
right. So, I mean. Mentioned there that you've obviously, you've come from fleece, and now you're sort of catering to more sportswear, outdoor wear kind of thing, and you do insulation, weather resistant fabrics and so on. So are these your main markets now? And what sort of are your leading innovations then in these areas?

Michael Cattanach
Sure. So the kind of touch points that we talk about when we, you know, if we have 30 seconds with a customer, or if we have a whole morning with our sales people, we'll remind them of the touch points of warm, dry, cool and safe, you know, and that's the kind of four ordinal cardinal points in the compass that we talk about for Polytech products. So everyone knows warm, right? It's pretty easy to keep people warm. You can just layer them up the things, and people have been doing that for for eons. Dry is kind of more difficult because you can be dry from the you can keep dry from the elements, but you can also want to stay dry with the system of clothing you're wearing. That's where some of the politic know how it comes in and making sure people are comfortable. So dry sounds easy. Just put a plastic bag over yourself, but it's actually, there's more to it than that. You dry from the moisture you're creating yourself, as well as the elements that want to get you wet. The cool thing is, it's kind of a light aligned to the dry as well. So we want to keep people comfortable. We wanted to keep people, you know, not be burdened by the clothing the wearing. They want to be nice and cool and comfortable. You know, we have a we have another thing we say, whereas people only start to think about the problems of the only start to think about the clothing when the clothing causes them a problem. Politech is about making things where you just put on and forget it because it's doing the job it wants to do. So the safe thing is the last thing. We have many things that, you know, keeping warm when you're in the outdoors is safe, but we also have a strong presence in military and flame resistant fabrics. So those are the kind of the four things. And you know, I'm just rattling them off here, but that was a lot of work by our marketing people to say, what are the, what are the tenants of politic here? How do we how do we define these quickly? So warm, dry, cool, safe is what it is. And we were really the inventors of the of what you would call the three layer clothing system for the outdoors. You know, that is something to keep you warm and dry next to the skin, something to keep you insulated. Is a mid layer, and then something to keep a shell. That all works. They all work together to make sure you're comfortable and, again, not burdened by the clothing you're wearing. So across that range, where we have, like, 400 odd things in our open line, that cover that you know, you could probably split it a third, a third, a third, and things that would be base layer, things that would be traditional insulation, and things that would be outerwear, shelky or final layer of top layer. But the way the world is now, you know, people want to use things. Want to have things more flexible. So we've constantly moving things around and using our material science, our knitting technology and our expertise in finishing to make things that can be used in the widest range of circumstances

Jessica Owen
possible. And I mean, among all these different areas, I know that sustainability is now something you're also having to sort of, you know, take into consideration. So I mean, that's primarily the reason I've asked you on the show today to sort of talk about this, because I know you've got an initiative going on. So I mean, when did the company start exploring sustainability? What was sort of the turning point for you guys? Well,

Michael Cattanach
we like to say that we were talking about recycled yarns and let's burden on the environment. Before words like sustainability, upcycle and recycle were in everyone's mouth. That goes way back to the early 90s, when dealing with the yarn suppliers we deal with, particularly here in the US, they had an opportunity to make yarns, polyester yarns, from recycled water bottles and offered it to Polytech. You know, it was clearly a wise decision to take, at the time, to do something that was not necessarily asked for by our customers, but something we thought was the right thing to do, and frankly, would give us a competitive edge and a story to tell in the market. So the ability to do recycled yarns really rests with Polytech back from the from the 90s, and coming right up to speed. Now, there's still a lot of recycled yarn out there, but to be able to do it with no degradation and performance on degradation of how you you know how this stuff actually works, or how it can be colored, primarily is it's where the polytechnore lies. So that's something that's been around for a while. I must say. Where we are 2021 now, probably in the last four years, I don't think I've had a conversation with a customer that hasn't involved recycled or sustainable or whatever. It was always a nice to have. It was always something to. What we're talking about, but now it's, it's at the top of everyone's list. So you know, people will have 2025, environmental goals for their organization, and they're looking for ways to to get there. Using recycled yarns and using more durable materials is certainly one of the ways to do it. So it goes back a long time for us, certainly before it was fashionable or profitable, yeah.

Jessica Owen
And so now obviously you have this eco engineering initiative, which is also sustainability. So when I mean, has that been around for the last four years, or is it a bit younger, or,

Michael Cattanach
yeah, maybe three years since we've been talking about eco engineering as something to pull together all our environmentally conscious efforts. You know, recycling is just one part of it. There's different aspects of water usage, energy energy usage, having factories that are closer to where the closer to where the garments are cut and so on, is a key one. You know, we make a lot of stuff here in the United States, but also have strong partnership and Development Partnership in China, where loads of stuff is made. We also have a partnership in Central Europe, where lots of garments are made. So we're taking things off the ocean basically as much as we can in trying to put things where our customers want them. It wasn't politics that pushed people to make garments in Asia, right? We followed the garment manufacturing out there by putting the factory out there. We serve it well in that direction.

Jessica Owen
Yeah, it's funny how there's this trend that everything went over to Asia, and I feel like, well, from talking to people in the industry, it feels like it's all coming back, and local manufacturing is something that's almost, you know, trendy or whatever, but that's what I sort of see. I mean, would you agree with that?

Michael Cattanach
Absolutely, you know the term we heard, I honestly can't remember the first customer I heard it from, but the trend was reshoring. And, you know, people saying, What is potech going to do to help us reshore? We want to have X percent of our manufacturing made in the Americas by year x and so, well, okay, we can help with that, but remember, it wasn't us that pushed you over to Asia in the first place. Everyone wanted, garment makeup costs, and thankfully, you know, politics still has its R D and its know how, and its core competencies here in North America. We We have a lot of expertise around the world, but we've maintained R and D and all that here and now be known by milking a company that is another step forward in the fundamentals of material science and testing and all that kind of stuff, which is only going to help us in those reshoring initiatives. Our customers are Africans for so it's definitely a trend. It's definitely a trend that's coming. You know, the the NAFTA CAFTA thing is part of it. The Trans Pacific. What was that thing called Trans Pacific Partnership is another part of it. All those things got people in big companies that manage large supply chains, got them thinking about what we're going to do for the next four, 510, 15 years, and how can we start working on it now? So I think politicking reads the world place to do that.

Jessica Owen
Yeah, yeah, definitely. But in terms of material science, then, as part of this eco engineering initiative, I read that you're sort of, well, you invented the first knit fabric from recycled plastic bottles. And I think there's a statistic on your website that, in total, like, since then, you've, like, saved 15 billion bottles, or something crazy like that. So do you mind just telling me a bit more about this, please?

Michael Cattanach
Sure. Sure. Well, like I said, the going back to the late 80s, early 90s, that recycled jar and available to politic at a similar price, and the same or nickels with different properties to Virgin polyester became available to us. So we put it into our constructions and worked out how to how to make freeze from it. When you have the expertise in knitting that we do and the ability to handle those yarns, it hasn't really been that difficult for us to do it. What has been difficult is to make people want it, because there is a slight upcharge with it, and nobody wants to pay for it. So the feedstock for that recycled yarn really comes from plastic water bottles, so like an avian bottom or whatever the local equivalent is. So the suppliers we deal with have the ability to sort out green bottles from brown bottles, from clear bottles, obviously, to be able to do the highest quality, dyeable, consistent yarn, we want to clear bottles right? So that's, that's where you see the difference in quality of recycled products, if you don't have the organization to sort out your feed stock, then you can have a yellowing. You can have basically impurities in your in your polyester, which would make it just inconsistent in dying. So you mentioned 15 billion bottles. I wish. It was 15 billion bottles. I think it's hovering around 1.5 billion.

Jessica Owen
Oh, I've got the one in five there.

Michael Cattanach
One in five, yeah. So it's still a lot, you know, I think we did some marketing said, Oh, that's like two quarters of the way to the moon or something. And, you know, we're pretty proud of ourselves, and we know that no other supplier comes close to us for the amount of bottles recycled, the amount of bottles that are prevented from going to landfill. But we're also humble about it and say that, you know what, there's 80 billion bottles go into landfill a year in the United States. So our 1.5 billion is great over the period of time we've been doing it, and it's, you know, it's rising exponentially because of all the reasons I mentioned that more and more people want this kind of stuff, but it still has, still a drop in the ocean, part in the pond, because a lot of stuff goes in the ocean. So, so yeah, it's a strong initiative for us. It's kind of like the headline story for our Eco engineering message. But it's not the only thing where, like I said, we were doing everything we can in material science and core chemistry and energy efficiency to be covered in that eco engineering platform.

Jessica Owen
Yeah, it's definitely only sort of one part of the puzzle, I suppose. And so I guess one of the best examples of how you're using recycled materials is something called the mono Air Jacket with Houdini. And apparently this is also 100% recyclable at end of life. Is that right? 

Michael Cattanach
That's right. Yeah, politicking, not garment makers, right? We make rolled goods, which we we sell to our customers, and they do the things they're great at with them. This is something where we worked closely with Houdini, who've been a strong partner of us for years, and have used our I've used many of our products for the benefits they bring with longevity. You know, one of the things we like to say about Polytech product is the way it looks when you buy it is the way it's going to look and the way it's going to perform for its entire life. We're we're building things that are robust and not trying trying to promote disposability. But with Houdini, they really wanted something where they did want to think, this time about the end of life of the garment. So the fabric from us, the fabric from us is 100% us is 100% polyester. There's different polyesters in there, but all recycled and recyclable. The work really came from Houdini to do things like the stitching, the zips, all the trims, frankly, all the stuff that politic often don't have to think about, because often just hand our materials off to people and say, have at it. You know what you're doing with you know what they're doing with garments. We don't necessarily know that, but this is a good one. This is a fun one where we learn a little bit about aspects of the business, little corners of industry that we hadn't really thought about before. Sure we see zips and we can recommend seam tapes and all that kind of stuff. But to see a company like Houdini go deep into it with with the specification at the end of the day that is, they want something that's fully recyclable is really impressive. They're an amazing little company who makes some really, some really impressive stuff, and they absolutely know the value of top quality materials.

Jessica Owen
He sounds it, yeah, definitely. I think a colleague of mine was, I don't know whether he got off sort of a free, be it a show from Houdini, and he always talks about it. Well,

Michael Cattanach
it's funny, because this won't be the first time I've mentioned this on a call, but I have a Houdini power stretch on right now, which is something of the, it's something of the Polytech uniform, right? If you're in the office, there's always like two or three people wearing these things. That's the Polytech tuxedo. Is a brightly colored Houdini hoodie I see.

Jessica Owen
So from talking to people in the industry, from what I understand, one of the main challenges for making a product recyclable is because of all the different components that go into it, and I'm imagining one day technology might become more advanced and be able to cope with this. But until then, would you say it's down to designers, and maybe even like fabric producers such as yourself, to take the responsibility to make that easier?

Michael Cattanach
There's there's definitely an onus on us that we're conscious of to make things with maximum recycled content for us that is recycled polyester in the main recycled nylon exists, but the energy usage to make recite recycled nylon isn't necessarily always beneficial, right? So similarly, with recycled spandex type products, urethanes, there they are. Possibly there are recycled things out there, but they aren't necessarily working as well or as energy efficient as uh, poly polyester recycling. So it's got to be, uh, to answer your question, yes, we'll take it on the chin and. Will do the work because we're expert material scientists, but it comes down to what people want to pay for this stuff in the first place. It's that we've had issues over the years of big customers who have sound environmental platforms and goals and targets and all that they don't want to pay 3456, cents more per meter for the recycled version of what they want from us. So decide to go on the cheap way. We want to make the sale. You know, we're a commercial, broad company, so we want to make the sale. So we'll do what the customer wants, but we would dearly love to be able to do much more recycled stuff, but the customer and the consumer probably has to us to understand that those things come at a cost. And I think more and more people do understand that they people want things that are that are recycled. I'm talking about in retail and at consumer level. You know, people are conscious of what they're buying more, more than ever, right? But there's also, there's still millions of millions of garments that are bought, and they're off the disposable quality, you know, they might be on one season, two season thing. So, Jessica, we can do it, but it needs to be. We need to be helped there.

Jessica Owen
Yeah. So, I mean, if you're saying that people don't want to pay for it, and they've got this choice at the moment, how would you sort of go about changing that? Is it maybe something to do with governments getting involved, or legislation about, I don't know, a company has to have X amount recycled content in something? Is that the only way it's going to, you know, improve?

Michael Cattanach
It's possible things could improve that way. We are not lobbyists, so we're not put in that direction. We're, you know, we're commercial company, and they want to make money, please? Everyone I want to keep getting paid. Jessica, so it's difficult, right? Because there is, everyone's got growth targets. Every customer we deal with got growth targets. They want to get to this place. I think there's a lot of fear out there about, let me try to describe it this way. Imagine you had three fleeces hanging on racks that all looked kind of the same, maybe at least a quarter zip, single pocket, whatever, and they're all 100 euros, $100 100 pounds, whatever it is, right? They're all the same price, if one of them is using recycled content, and in order for that same customer to to maintain the margin so they, you know, to do what they want to do to meet the revenue goals. They have to sell that 105 bucks. Are they going to take the risk to do that? You know, if the, if the garments are ostensibly identical, probably not going to take the risk to to mark up the price, put it in there at the same price, and take their, you know, take the $45 whoever it is, margin to get for that, and it's not a problem for them. So when I say it's a two way street, I'm not saying our customers make life difficult for us at all. We've got we love all our customers, but we there needs to be an understanding that we can't just make everything recycled without getting paid for it, basically.

Jessica Owen
Well, I mean, you say that now because obviously your customers, they have their own customers, and so I guess it boils down to consumers. But from what I've heard, even things like COVID 19 and in maybe just the last couple of years, in general, there is a slight shift towards people buying more consciously. I mean, do you see that? Really

Michael Cattanach
couldn't tell you if COVID 19 has affected people buying more consciously. It's certainly affected buying behaviors. I think people are more cautious about what they buy right now. Yeah. I mean, I'll give you a little story. I was, I was, I was in Salt Lake City, one of these trade shows, maybe four years ago or something, and I I lost my luggage, or something happened. I need to buy a couple of T shirts. And I went into an H M and bought a $5 t shirt, and stripy $5 t shirt for five bucks, organic cotton. It's like, Wow. I can't believe there's an organic cotton t shirt for five bucks, or six or seven bucks. It was, it was less than 10 bucks, whatever it was. And it's like, I wonder how long this will last, and I still have it, and it's still, you know, it's still okay. It's not. It looks like a four year old t shirt. Doesn't look like there's nothing wrong with it. So I think when you've got a company like that that's using their leverage and their buying power to to get those kind of products out there. There's clearly a market for them. I think we see the same sort of thing. People want the recycled story. People want the want to feel good about what they're buying. You know, they want to be, yeah, and want to feel like they're doing something conscious for the planet. But they probably don't want to spend. I don't know what the number is. There probably is a number. You could work out they're probably going to spend less than 10% more to get it in. In most cases, they don't want to spend anything more. So definitely seen that over the last over the last few years, started in Europe, really, there's a real it's a real strong competition between a. At the kind of national brands in Europe to to meet these environmental targets, and certainly here in the US, it's becoming more and more of an issue with the COVID stuff. I really don't know if anyone's been buying more sustainable, more environmentally friendly stuff. I haven't seen that yet. It's just a continuation. I think, of the story over the last the last four or five years, really? Okay,

Jessica Owen
just a couple more questions to pose to you then. So in terms of your eco engineering initiative, have you got any sort of more plans in the pipeline? There? Is there anything that's on your wish list? Perhaps,

Michael Cattanach
yeah, we've got a watching brief on all sorts of different technologies. You know, bio produced polymers is something we've been looking at for a long time, whether they're the replacements for traditional nylons and polyesters or whether they're completely novel fibers. That's something that we're really interested in. I I love looking at your website for that kind of thing. That's we get a lot of good information from there. That's something we're looking at for a while. Your conversations come up along a lot of the time about our recycled spandex, removing spandex. That's one of the things that's seen as being like a quote, unquote, dirty chemical out there. But that's an awesome job, and it's really hard to replace. So does that I mean fluorocarbons has been something I've been working on my entire career, and the push away from any kind of fluorocarbon is is ongoing. You know, that's the that's to get the performance without the chemistry is one of the things that we, along with a whole bunch of other people, are continuing to work on. So it's always, it's a lot of incremental steps, right? There's a lot of steps to take that I can't tell you, and it wouldn't tell you if this was something just around the corner that we're just about to change the world with a lot of stuff has been discovered, and we're working on, working on how to fit things into our product line the most efficiently and economically. And

Jessica Owen
so finally, then it's quite a difficult question to answer in, you know, a few seconds or so. But do you think the industry can ever become sustainable, and what are the main things we sort of need to overcome until we can get there,

Michael Cattanach
totally sustainable? 

Jessica Owen
I mean, pretty much sustainable. It can.

Michael Cattanach
I think it's a similar answer, right? There's going to be lots of incremental steps that can be taken. There's going to be lots of things that, you know, politics are pretty small company compared to the H M's and in the text and people that that was mentioned before, you know, like tiny compared to those guys. So we'll do what we can, and we'll, we'll keep going, and we'll take these incremental steps, and we'll make the best products we can with the technologies available. But when those guys step up, you know, when the big sports where people step up and start demanding, the start demand and they're only going to use recycle, or they move away from this chemical or that, then that's when the big changes will really happen. That's when the possibly be a groundswell of of a movement. You know, this is when things become normal, like that. So sustainable. I think we're always going to be moving things around the planet. That's just how it is. So pure sustainability would rely on, you know, carbon offset and all that kind of stuff, so many parts to it. Jessica, I couldn't say we'll ever get there, but I know that it's absolutely trending in the right direction. It's on everyone's minds. It's the top of every agenda with every customer meeting. So that's that can only be a good thing.

Jessica Owen
Yeah, definitely. I completely agree. It's interesting to hear that that is the theme of most of your meetings. So that is definitely positive. Well, I think we're running out of time. I'd love to ask you more questions, especially about fluorocarbons. Actually, I've read a few articles recently, but, you know, I'll quiz you about that some other day. But thank you very much for joining me, and it's been really interesting to hear sort of a realistic view, I would say, about sustainability and textiles and what you're up to. Thank you. 

Michael Cattanach
All right pleasure.