Patagonia Tells the True Story of Your Clothing
by Amanda Wills
Published on November 4th, 2009
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When you buy a new fleece jacket or a pair of leather ballerina flats, do you ever think of how that product came into fruition? After the initial idea, what was the next step, and how did it eventually end up in your shopping cart?
It’s called cradle-to-cradle, a term that encompasses a product’s entire lifecycle – from assembly and usage to disposal and end-of-life solution. For most of us, this process exists on another level and may not be the main attribute we focus on when shopping.
Patagonia apparel company has launched The Footprint Chronicles – a brutally honest description of its products’ journey. The interactive map allows customers to trace the production path from source materials to store shelves.
Earth911 followed the popular R2 jacket starting with its initial design in Ventura, Calif. While the fleece is made from recycled fiber, it’s journey literally circled around the world from Yadkinville, N.C. to Hudson, N.H. to certification in Switzerland to sewing in Columbia and final distribution in Reno, Nevada.
But some readers ask, why not manufacture the goods in the U.S.?
“Patagonia often touts environmental responsibility and claims to have an environmentally-conscious business model, yet virtually every single product that Patagonia sells through its catalog is produced overseas. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of Patagonia customers live in the United States,” says one customer.
Vincent Stanley, writer and editor for Patagonia, says that while the company sources at least half of its production outside of the U.S., the percentage has shrunk over time. But Stanley maintains that, for now, the benefits of using more environmentally conscious fibers such as organic cotton and recycled polyester outweigh the extra transportation, which account for less than 2 percent of the carbon footprint of the products.
“We might be a greener company if we put quality second. But we instruct our designers and production people to put quality first,” Stanley writes. “What does that mean? A product has to be durable. And when it does come to the end of its useful life, its different components should wear out at the same time.”
