Selwyn College MSt student, Andy Wright (SE 2022), shares his journey towards introducing sustainable sports kits for the Cambridge University Football Club, spearheading positive change in the clothing industry.
“Shall we make our next clothing collection from salmon skin, pineapple or fishing nets recovered from the ocean?”
When I co-founded a clothing business with a sustainable mission in 2018, I hadn’t anticipated that we would be asking ourselves this question. As it turns out, we’ve used all of those materials and more besides. In fact, we’ve tested more fabrics that I can count. The five-year journey has been an extremely steep learning curve. This was totally predictable when trying to do radically new things in an enormous, well-established industry. Such a shame that no one told me! Unsurprisingly, this meant I was naturally interested in engaging with the sustainability efforts of the college when I joined Selwyn in September 2022 for my MSt. The college’s current sustainability charter is bold — just as we would want it to be — yet I noticed that the area of clothing was yet to be explored. So, I reached out to the university sports teams to discover whether I could help. It proved to be a fruitful query: I discovered that most teams change their kit annually, and many are producing one-off Varsity match kits. Understandably, the athletes involved are honoured to take part and treasure these kits as souvenirs of their time playing, yet the totality of resources used for new sports clothing at Cambridge is significant when you consider the combination of colleges and sports.
The great news is that we’ve just started the journey to make sports kits at Cambridge more sustainable! Matt Hawthorn, captain of the men’s Cambridge University Football team, was immediately engaged. He was driven knowing that his kit alone would recycle the equivalent of 30 post-consumer half-litre PET (polyethyleneterephthalate) plastic bottles. The process for this is simple. We first shred those plastic bottles into small pieces at a recycling plant and clean them. The shredded plastic is then melted down, and the resulting mass is extrusion pressed into yarn, which is then woven into the fabric. This is what we make into clothing. Recycling one ton of PET waste saves 3.8 barrels of oil, with 86% less water consumption and 75% less energy consumption than conventional PET manufacturing. Importantly for sportspeople, due to recent advances in technology, they will not have to compromise on the breathability and stretchiness that they have come to expect from ordinary fabrics.
Nonetheless, changing consumer habits in favour of buying more sustainable garments will take time, as we have learned from the customers of our ready-to-wear collections. People’s purchase decisions still revolve primarily around whether the clothes look good on them. So, when marketing our clothes, we learnt to bring the focus to the practical benefits of our fabrics, such as our dresses not requiring dry cleaning and having ‘wash, hang and wear’ convenience, just like a T-shirt. We also realised there was no sense in trying to produce responsibly if the product loses colour or shape after a couple of washes and ends up in the bin again. We worked with the R&D department of Procter & Gamble (P&G) to validate our clothes’ practical longevity. P&G verified that our clothes last in excess of 35 washes, but statistically, it appears that few of us experience even 30 wears use from our clothes, with around half of all clothes purchased being thrown away within a year.
If we all chose to buy a few select items of clothing that we really cared for, imagine the dramatic reduction we could make to the 80 billion pieces that are made annually. Of course, all of this is a small contribution to the sustainability mission; there are still enormous challenges ahead for us in making every part of the manufacturing process more sustainable. We can’t pretend that deciding how we become more sustainable is not fraught with debate. I’m one of the numerous electric car owners on the roads, but I intrinsically know that their positive impact is dependent on how the electricity is generated, how responsibly the cars are made, how easily the cars can be recycled, and so on. Clothing is no different, but by making a start we get closer to figuring it all out.
I am certain that things will continue to change. Like the university football team, many companies are changing their purchasing decisions. Across the sporting industry, you can see a surge of investment in more responsible products to meet corporate strategic commitments, at the demands of stakeholders; nowadays, many of the premier league football club shirts are produced with some form of recycled fabric.
It has been an honour to be part of this journey with the Cambridge University football teams. If the oldest football club in the world is putting its best foot forward, there’s hope for us all.
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