Two years ago, Santini asked a simple question that would lead to a high-tech answer: what is the cycling jersey of the future?
To find the answer, Santini met with Polartec for an ideas session in the cycling clothing company’s hometown of Bergamo, Italy. Santini’s creative director Fergus Niland said he was open to hearing Polartec’s ideas. “We sat down and it was like, Well you guys are the innovators here,” he told me, adding that he was open to implementing the fabric company’s suggestions.
The idea Santini suggested was one that’s at the cutting edge of sportswear fabrics and sustainability: carbon capture, where carbon dioxide emissions are captured and then converted into recycled polyester yarns.
This process led Polartec to develop the new Polartec Power Dry with Recycled Carbon fabric, which features in Santini’s new Aero Race cycling jersey, and is the first commercial application of the material.
Brewing beer
The yarns used in the fabric, which features on the front and rear panels of the Aero Race jersey, are said to be made with 91 per cent recycled carbon content, thanks to a process Ramesh Kesh, business manager at Polartec, described as “similar to brewing beer”.
“We were really trying to look for something beyond the status quo of what people talk about from a recycling polyester point of view,” said Kesh.
According to Kesh, there have been two main ways to recycle polyester. The first is recycling PET bottles found on land, and the other has been recovering material from the oceans. But carbon capture technology changes focus from the land and sea to the air, capturing the CO2 emissions that would otherwise go up into the atmosphere.
The emissions Polartec uses come from steel mills, which are ‘carbon rich’. “Once it is captured, it goes through this process of purification, separation, filtration, and eventually fermenting it to produce ethanol,” said Kesh.
According to Kesh, that ethanol is then converted into ethylene glycol, which is one of the ‘building blocks’ required to make polyester. Currently, the other building blocks needed to make the polyester yarns still come from fossil fuels, but the end result is a fabric and jersey that has an obvious environmental benefit.
“If you take this particular garment and you compare that with a conventional virgin polyester-based garment, there is about a two-thirds – 66%, roughly – reduction in the carbon footprint,” Kesh said.
Synthetic realities
Despite a change in production, Santini’s Aero Race jersey comes with the performance claims of a jersey made from virgin polyester, derived from crude oil or natural gas. Santini says the jersey “ensures optimal breathability and thermoregulation”.
Niland said it has been “through the ringer” to ensure it’s good enough for pros, but also consumers. He added that when recycled synthetic fabrics were beginning to come into cycling more than a decade ago, they were “rejected” by consumers.
“They were just not nice,” Niland said. “They were too heavy. They weren't, let's just say, of a sufficient quality to be desirable enough.” But he described the new Power Dry with Recycled Carbon as a "beautiful fabric that just so happens to have this innovative technology”.
That’s something Kesh echoed. He explained the new material takes Polartec’s existing Power Dry fabric but “From a performance point of view is as good or better than the old product”, while the sustainability component acts as a “force multiplier”.
According to Niland, that force multiplier could exist across Santini’s range. While the carbon-capture technology is currently used in the Power Dry fabric, it could be extended across a range of fabrics of different weights and performance qualities.
Niland said Santini, as a company, is conscious of its emissions and sustainability, which has fed into its decision to manufacture in Italy and Europe, and to use solar panels on the roof of its factory, to name two examples.
But Niland summarised the move towards adopting technology such as carbon capture and thinking about emissions bluntly, which speaks to EU legislation around emissions, and a general sense of responsibility: “You can't go backwards anymore. That's just the reality of the world of synthetics in sportswear.”
Cycling’s advantage, and getting lost
Fabrics made from captured carbon aren’t entirely new – companies such as LuLu Lemon and On have already released collections using the technology – but Niland and Kesh see cycling as advantageous for developing technologies such as this.
“Cycling as a sport puts the human through a variation in different situations that fabric suppliers love to understand,” Niland said, “because you're going to the point where your body gets incredibly hot, incredibly cold, against the air, against rain.”
Cycling’s relatively minor scale compared to the rest of the outdoors industry is also beneficial for companies such as Polartec.
“You can develop a product, test it at the very highest level, which usually means go inside the pro teams to see how things function, and just simply produce things,” Niland added, explaining that large companies would have to go through many more steps to get a product to market.
Santini’s smaller size meant that Polartec could, in the case of the fabric used in the Aero Race jersey, quickly gain field data. “We wouldn’t be sitting here talking about this, if not for that quick feedback that we were able to get,” Kesh told me.
Despite this, Niland believes the cycling clothing industry has “got a little bit lost” in recent years, with companies struggling and relying on tactics such as price reductions (Rapha announced last year it was coming off the “discounting drug”).
The real answer to what the cycling jersey of the future might look like is that it won’t look that different from the jersey of today. After all, its function will remain the same. But the focus on sustainability could get things back on track.
“A bike jersey has a life that's really quite difficult, potentially worn and used during the course of exercise that lasts for hours per day,” Niland said, “and you have to really establish the worth of the product. That's what I like about this. We’re trying to really innovate here and re-establish that.”
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