10-04-2025
This Polyester Outdoor Jacket Is Made From Polyester Outdoor Jackets
You may own a fleece top or two made from plastic soda bottles. Recycled polyester, or polyethylene terephthalate, known in the industry as PET or just 'chip,' is old hat. US outdoor clothing brand Patagonia first transformed trash into fluffy fleece in 1993. So far, so normal. But it's not anywhere near normal for a polyester outdoor jacket to be recycled into PET and then remade as another polyester outdoor jacket.
British outdoor clothing brand Páramo has achieved this feat, although at a premium. The employee-owned company's $830 Halkon 360° jacket—360° as in full circle, a nod to the product's recycled nature—has a fabric liner made from recycled chip, but it's twice the price of its Halkon jacket that does not have a liner made from recycled chip.
'Performance-wise, the jackets are exactly the same,' says Páramo CEO Richard Pyne. 'They will both keep you dry and comfortable out on the hill.'
Both are also made by the Miquelina Foundation, a nun-run sewing workshop offering practical help to women rescued from the streets of Bogotá, Colombia. Páramo has partnered with this educational body since 1992 when the company was spun out of Nikwax, a British brand of waterproofing products for outdoor kit. (Páramo is a grassland habitat ecosystem of South America's Andes mountains.)
Páramo CEO Richard Pyne.
Páramo
Páramo and Nikwax—both based in the market town of Wadhurst in rural East Sussex (population: 3,407)—were founded by Nick Brown, an extremely tall outdoors enthusiast who concocted an eco-friendly boot waterproofing product in the late 1970s while fresh out of university.
Nikwax still makes this boot wax as well as wash-in PFAS-free water-based waterproofing products using Durable Water Repellent (DWR) polymer coatings; these are hydrophobic or water-hating, and it's this 'hate' that does the repelling. Nikwax products are free of solvents, persistent chemicals of concern, and perfluorochemicals, or PFCs.
'The 360° [version of the Halkon] arrived at the end of a seven-year development cycle for us,' says Pyne. 'We've always manufactured in polyester, keeping to a single material to eventually make it easier to solve the end-of-life problem [for our products]. We believe that the onus is on the brand, rather than the customer, to collect and deal with end-of-life garments. If consumers put jackets into bins, nobody really knows where anything goes, whereas a business can collect it all and know what's what. We've been working with a chemical recycling facility in Japan for several years, sending them a few tons of jackets collected each year. Chemical recycling for textiles is still relatively new. When we started collecting old jackets, the chemical recycling technology was not available.'
Two years ago, the recycling technology was ready for commercialization.
'Our [Japanese] facility got to the point where their chemically recycled PET chips—the building blocks of polyester—was the same quality as virgin polyester; that was a breakthrough. Up until that point, we'd had either mechanical recycling, where whatever you put in is what you get out, so any impurities, including dyes, become part of the output, leading to a drop-off in quality; not great for high-performance outdoor clothing.'
The Japanese recycled chip was now as good as virgin polyester but was fiendish expensive.
'The [new-process] chip was fifteen times the price of the standard recycled chip,' says Pyne, 'and that wouldn't be something that could we ordinarily move forwards with.'
But, by making a halo product—and that's the Halkon 360° jacket—'we could show the world that it *is* possible [to use this technology],' says Pyne. 'We're a small business, but if we were willing to do this, others might be convinced to do it, too.' With other companies working with the technology, prices will come down. 'There are many businesses out there that are much bigger than us, and not just in the outdoor industry, who can and should be doing this. The fifteen-times-more expensive technology can come down to something that's actually affordable.'
Making and selling the Halkon 360° jacket was, confirms Pyne, done to 'start a conversation' around the full-circle recycling technology. According to Pyne, companies such as Nike and Adidas could use the chemically recycled PET chip. 'We shouldn't be paying fifteen times more for fully sustainable textiles,' he says. 'It's still cheaper to make virgin polyester than to chemically recover it, but that needs to change.'
Páramo has worked with a vertically integrated fabric mill in Colombia for 26 years. 'They can spin their own yarns and then make their own textiles,' says Pyne, 'and they said we'll buy some chip, and we'll make your lining fabric for you.'
Páramo's outdoor garments don't work like jackets made from Gore-Tex, a waterproof barrier fabric made with a partially breathable expanded PTFE membrane. Gore-Tex jackets must be joined with 'welded' seams, stuck down with powerful glues. Such glues and taped seams make Gore-tex jackets unsuitable for chemical recycling. Once a Gore-tex fabric has been punctured, water seeps in, rendering that part of the jacket ineffective. Páramo jackets, on the other hand, are not made with barrier membranes and still work when punctured. The fabrics used for the outers are not impervious to rain, but water ingress is slowed through the use of (Nikwax) chemical treatments. While water can seemingly soak the outer fabric of a Páramo jacket, the jacket's hydrophilic, i.e., water-loving, internal liner sucks up water droplets and sweat vapor and 'pumps' it outside the jacket via capillary action known as 'wicking.'
'Nick's about eight foot tall,' jokes Pyne, 'and he struggled in membranes. He got very hot [when walking outdoors] and didn't find [membranes] worked for him, so he started thinking, 'There's got to be a better way of doing this.' He's pretty stubborn—as most entrepreneurs are—and he looked at how mammals keep themselves dry. He worked with textile mills to develop a fabric that mimicked animal fur. He used his TX-10 [waterproofing liquid, now known as TX-Direct] to replicate the oil in animal fur and got this movement of water from one side of the material to the other. [Páramo] keeps you dry in a different way [to membranes]. You don't have that horrible, sweaty feel on the inside. You can stick pins in [a Páramo garment], pierce it with nails, and then take them out, and it will perform exactly the same. It means you can darn it if you get it caught on something, and it rips.'
The raw material used to make polyester is crude oil. 'Extracting oil from the ground is a dirty business, laden with environmental and social risks,' says a Páramo statement. 'By recycling polyester, we conserve the material we've already extracted and help reduce the need for more drilling.'
Both Nikwax and Páramo have operated as an employee-owned business since 2022, when Brown transferred his shares to the firm's Employee Ownership Trust (EOT).
Páramo's sales are seasonal (the brand has few products for summer use), but the firm's long-term manufacturing contract with the Miquelina Foundation ensures year-round production. One hundred twenty women are employed by the project, with Páramo saying its work with the Miquelina Foundation has helped more than 10,000 local women since 1992. 85% of Páramo Clothing is produced by the Miquelina Foundation.
'Whereas most brands will book a production space over in the Far East for spring, summer and another one for [fall] and winter, we maintain level production throughout the year so that Miquelina have steady income coming in,' says Pyne. 'There are no peaks and troughs, so Miquelina can maintain staffing.'
The Colombian workers are part of Páramo's EOT structure.
'For them, it's amazing,' says Pyne. 'They're part of this Western company. We're very open with our finances; everyone wins.'
The Halkon 360° jacket is available in green only.
'We make jackets that last a long time,' says Pyne. 'We don't use fashion colors that might be popular for just six months, and then our retailers feel the need to sell them all off cheap and buy new ones in. That would feed the problem. We design with longevity in mind.'
