The North Face Trials Biodegradable Polyester Alternative

Alexandra Harrell
·2 min read

It’s a well-established fact that clothing sheds. These tiny fibers—often made of polyester—account for nearly half of all microplastics in the natural environment.

While preventing clothing from shedding isn’t necessarily a practical goal, researchers out of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) believe a better solution is emerging.

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And now, The North Face has teamed up with a group from the United States Department of Energy to determine if that better solution has legs.

The Bio-Optimized Technologies to Keep Thermoplastics out of Landfills and the Environment (Bottle) consortium is researching polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) as a nontoxic and biodegradable alternative to traditional petroleum-derived polyester.

“PHAs can also break down naturally without a highly controlled, composting environment,” said Katrina Knauer, chief technology officer of the Bottle Consortium. “We’re actually showing we can control the microstructure to get PHA to behave like polyester fibers and textiles.”

In fact, Bottle scientists have already developed a “portfolio of PHAs” with various properties, including some that behave like conventional polyester but are instead biobased and easier to recycle.

Here’s where The North Face comes into play. The VF Corp-owned brand and that team of scientists are bringing those sustainable materials to the outdoor apparel industry. Throughout the next 12 months, Bottle will scale the production process of PHA fibers, which The North Face will trial for use in select product lines.

“We are committed to making the best-performing products while leaving an ever-smaller footprint on the planet,” said Carol Shu, senior manager for global sustainability at The North Face. “Materials innovation is a pinnacle of our brand, and this project not only brings to life new possibilities for synthetic textiles but also supports our focus on enabling product circularity.”

The project will prioritize analysis to understand the energy and carbon intensity of making and recycling PHA fibers, NREL said. The teams will also simulate microfiber shedding to measure their rate of biodegradation in various environmental scenarios. The results should give The North Face enough data to compare PHA textile sustainability against the incumbent polyester. After reviewing those results, the outdoor brand will test prototype fibers with its suppliers with the hopes of releasing a line of more sustainable gear.

And Bottle’s PHAs are more sustainable than conventional polyester because they’re designed for recycling. The consortium has tailored the chemical backbone of PHA to increase its mechanical toughness for chemical recyclability. So, once the product reaches the end of life, Bottle’s chemical recycling technology can deconstruct the PHA fibers—and other polymers—back into chemical building blocks pure enough for reusability.

“Our redesigned PHA structure substantially increased mechanical toughness and renders the new PHA chemically recyclable to its building-block monomer with a simple catalyst and heat,” said Ravikumar Gowda, a Bottle researcher based at Colorado State University. “The recovered monomer can be reused to reproduce the same PHA again, in principle, infinitely.”