Atlantis Headwear Sustainability Series 2024 US

Recycledpolyester Polyester is an important fiber in our collections and one of the most widely used in the world: strong, durable and crease-resistant, it allows us to make lightweight headwear that dry quickly. But its production comes at an environmental cost: it’s a synthetic fiber derived from oil with a lower environmental impact than the production of natural fibers in terms of water and land1 but, the energy required to produce polyester makes it a very high-impact process 2 . This is why Atlantis wants to encourage the use of recycled polyester instead of virgin fossil-based one. Its alter-ego, recycled polyester, or rPET, is made from polymers obtained by melting used plastic bottles and transforming them into textile fiber. Did you know that every minute, nearly 1 million plastic bottles are purchased around the world?3 Even if recycled options allow a reduction of emissions compared to the virgin options, we know that it’s not the definitive solution to pollution from synthetic fibers: rPET’s mechanical recycling process significantly reduces the material’s quality and unfortunately very few clothes are recycled back into textile use and the majority of wasted polyester garments are still in the landfills. Moreover, rPET is not biodegradable and loses microplastic fibers as much as virgin plastic. 1 Sustainable Apparel Materials 2015 (https://matteroftrust.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/10/SustainableApparelMaterials.pdf) 2 (Environmental Sciences Europe (2021) Analysis of the polyester clothing value chain to identify key intervention points for sustainability) 3 The Guardian