What Constitutes Green Gear? A Look at the Bluesign Standard

By Anna Brones

Making a shirt or a backpack from a progressive material, like recycled PET, is just the beginning of sustainable gear. Environmentally conscious companies are quickly coming to realize that monitoring their manufacturing facilities is just as important as monitoring what materials are being used. But supply chains are complex and tracking the manufacturing of a product from the raw materials to its finished stage is difficult.

It has therefore become increasingly clear that using a third party organization to monitor and screen production facilities is a smart way to go to show the consumer that a certain product meets a range of environmental standards. Bluesign is one of those certifications that allow member companies to be sure that ever product produced complies with a certain set of acceptable environmental standards.

Developed by a project initiative in 1997, the bluesign standard is implemented by Swiss-based bluesign technologies ag, which links together suppliers, manufacturers, retailers and brands. In this way bluesign works to have all parties involved commit to jointly reduce the environmental footprint of the textile industry, making the pledge to sustain more environmentally friendly practices not just as a company-by-company policy, but as part of the wider industry as a whole. What makes bluesign stand out is that it “tackles the problem at its roots,” says Peter Waeber, bluesign technologies ag CEO. “Instead of focusing on finished product testing, all input streams – from raw materials, to chemical components, to water and energy resources – are analyzed with a sophisticated ‘Input Stream Management’ process.”

Built around five basic principles (resource productivity, consumer safety, air emission, water emission and occupational health and safety) the bluesign standard analyzes every chemical component prior to production and gives each one a rating based on its “ecotoxicological” impact, eliminating potentially harmful substances before production even begins. But one of the key elements that makes bluesign popular with companies and consumers is that the standard doesn’t want to give up on product functionality, quality or design. For cases where products necessitate specific chemicals to maintain the product’s performance attributes “it is fundamental to properly manage the manufacturing process that also includes the use of smart process controls and end-of-pipe solutions to protect the people in the supply chain and the environment,” says Waeber.

“The focus here lies mainly on the brands. They have to tell their consumers what they are doing about the environment,” says Waeber, emphasizing the importance of transparency. However, the textile industry is one where “there is a lot of confusion about the various standards on the market, and nobody really knows what they all cover,” continues Waeber. “This is one of the reasons why we decided to create the bluesign standard. We wanted to provide solutions for every aspect along the entire textile manufacturing chain.” Big outdoor brands like Patagonia, Mountain Co-op Equipment, The North Face and Helly Hansen have already seen the importance of such a standard and are all on bluesign’s list of members, leading the way for other companies in the industry to become more transparent about their environmental impacts.