NEW YORK—Designtex announced that Susan Lyons, president of Designtex, will be honored as a Legacy Innovator at the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute’s inaugural Innovation Celebration event, which will be held in New York on November 15 to recognize leaders in product design innovation as they create better products for our world.
This award recognizes Lyons’s pioneering role as a passionate but practically minded advocate for environmental sustainability in textile design. In 1993, Lyons, then Creative Director of Designtex, began to research the possibility of developing a collection of ecological fabrics. But at that time no one knew exactly what a “green” fabric should be. Should it be made of recycled materials, recyclable materials, or perhaps natural fibers? Lyons contacted William McDonough, an architect and leader in the field of sustainable design, to get his input.
McDonough proposed the concept of “waste = food” as a guiding principle for design—setting a goal of making a “consumable” product that when used or discarded would turn into soil without any harmful side effects. A partnership then emerged between Lyons, McDonough, his colleague the chemist Michael Braungart, and Albin Kälin of the Swiss mill Rohner Textil AG. Their goal was to develop a “consumable” and ultimately biological-nutrient upholstery.
Scraps Considered ‘Hazardous Waste’
Kälin’s mill was located in a small farming community in Switzerland, where it operated under strict environmental standards. Government regulations deemed textile scraps from the weaving process to be hazardous waste, forcing the mill to export its scraps to Spain for disposal, a costly practice. Rohner’s products included a textile called Climatex, with a high content of wool and ramie (a natural plant fiber), which had been initially developed for its moisture-absorbing qualities. If the third major ingredient—polyester—were removed, they would have the beginnings of a fabric that could break down and return safely to the earth after its useful life, following the “waste = food” principle. But in order to achieve this goal, every input would have to be analyzed, including the dyestuffs and other process chemicals used in weaving.
Braungart invited 60 different chemical companies to collaborate on the project. All but one—Ciba-Geigy—declined, reluctant to subject their formulations to the necessary scrutiny. With Ciba-Geigy’s help Braungart analyzed more than 8,000 chemical formulations commonly used in textile production, and then selected a mere 38 that he deemed safe for human and environmental health. These were the dyes and process chemicals that could be used in the production of the reformulated Climatex upholstery. This optimization of the chemistry transformed the mill’s effluent: the water now flowing out of the mill was actually cleaner than the inflowing water. Further, with these new biodegradable fabrics, the mill’s scraps went from hazardous “waste” to nutrient-giving “food”: its scraps were made into felt and used by local strawberry farmers as ground cover for their crops, and the mill was no longer obliged to pay costly disposal fees.
The creative fruit of this collaboration was Designtex’s first Climatex upholstery collection, launched in 1995. Lyons, McDonough, Braungart, and Kälin had developed a true “consumable,” an industrially produced textile that was entirely compostable. At the end of their useful life, Climatex upholsteries can simply be thrown in the garden to become food for other living organisms. Designtex continues to add styles to the Climatex collection, which is now woven by Gessner AG in Switzerland, but continues to use a design and manufacturing process that has proven its sustainability over close to two decades.
Work Influenced Steelcase
Lyons’s work on the design of Climatex as a “biological-nutrient” upholstery created another productive link in what she terms “an ecosystem of partners”: following the successful development of this product, Lyons introduced McDonough and the Cradle to Cradle concept to Designtex’s parent company, Steelcase. In this way, Designtex’s trial project in sustainability acted as a catalyst in introducing new ways of thinking about manufacturing processes to its larger corporate partner.
“The Climatex project is a compelling example of what can be accomplished when a network of motivated partners comes together to solve a problem,” says Lyons. “The project also demonstrates that the Cradle to Cradle framework is an intelligent product development platform yielding benefits along the supply chain. The final product is a healthy and compostable textile that is beautiful, provides user comfort and is compostable. What more could we ask for?”
Go to the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute and Designtex.
