The data is in from the Retail Polybag Recycling Pilot Project, a partnership between Eco-Cycle and the Plastic Impact Alliance. In just three months, the pilot collected almost 75,000 plastic polybags from 11 outdoor businesses on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado.��

Working within a hyperlocal space, using a bicycle powered collection cart that replaced the typical fossil fuel powered trucking model, Eco-Cycle staff and students from Boulder High School went door-to-door each Thursday from October through December collecting polybags that employees at each store collected from their shipments. Participating brands were Artilect, Backcountry, Black Diamond, ����ä������ä�����, Helly Hansen, Himali, Norrona, ���ϳԹ��� Inc., Patagonia, Sherpani, and Stio.

“The data we collected in the polybag pilot program is immensely useful,” said Kate Christian, corporate sustainability manager at Eco-Cycle, a nonprofit in Boulder Colorado that specializes in capturing and recycling hard-to-recycle materials. “By extrapolating this data, we can begin to get a sense of how massive this problem is. Our pilot looked at 11 storefronts on a single street in Boulder. But globally, those 11 brands represent roughly 95 of storefronts nationwide. If we were to capture and recycle the polybags from all those locations, we’d be looking at more than 55,000 pounds and over and more than 4.5 million polybags.” 

“It’s important to note that even that number is only the tip of the iceberg because that’s only from 11 brands and doesn’t include all the other outdoor brand stores and the 1,000+ independent specialty retailers in the outdoor industry,” said Kristin Hostetter, co-founder of the Plastic Impact Alliance. “When we extrapolate that number even further to look at the entire industry, we’re talking about billions of polybags that have nowhere to go. This should serve as a wake up call for the outdoor industry.”

Each company involved in the pilot program was provided with a detailed report of their polybag usage, broken down by weight and number of bags. Brands were also given details on how their store’s polybag numbers compared with the others in the pilot. (Numbers ranged from about one pound per week to about 17 pounds.)

Additionally, each brand in the pilot was invited to continue recycling through the program at a cost of less than $20 per pickup. As a nonprofit, Eco-Cycle aims to make this a sustainable program that covers its own costs which include paying the student volunteer collectors. To date, eight of the original partners have committed to continuing the recycling efforts: ����ä������ä�����, Patagonia, Stio, Norrona, Helly Hansen, Artilect, Backcountry, Black Diamond, and ���ϳԹ���, Inc. (OBJ’s parent company). “We are still actively talking with our original partners and many others in the area in hopes of bringing in more stores,” said Christian. “It’s important for companies to understand that recycling is a service—just like cleaning or garbage pickup. Companies are not entitled to free polybag recycling; they have a responsibility to pay for it.”

�������������: A Case Study on What Brands Can Do

����ä������ä�����, which has a 3,380 square-foot store on Pearl Street, was eager to join the pilot program from the word “go” and has already signed up for continued polybag collection. “There is genuine excitement at ����ä������ä����� from both folks at corporate and retail staff around solving waste,” said Christian. “The staff isn’t just recycling the bags because somebody told them to. They’re doing it because they care. This is evident every Thursday when we pick up their polybags. Not only is the staff diligent about managing their polybag contamination, but they’re constantly asking unrelated recycling questions around things like textiles and silica packets.” Contamination, by the way, is a real issue when it comes to polybag recycling. Often tissue paper, stickers, and desiccant packets are mixed in with the plastic. These items can cause jams in the balers and contaminate whole batches of plastic.��

Daniel Higbee, the Pearl Street store manager is a big fan of the program. “My staff loved that the polybag pilot program used high school students to pick up on bikes, bringing the next generation in. And we appreciated having an end result that brings more visibility to other downtown retail outlets.”

“The Retail Polybag Recycling Project provided a unique opportunity to responsibly upcycle our polybags without transportation emissions,” said Kaytlin Moeller, sustainability manager at ����ä������ä�����. “Knowing that our bags are being made into a long-lasting, durable material [Trex decking] was another feature that drew us to the program. Based on our learnings and the success of the pilot, we are looking forward to the possibility of similar programs in other locations.” Moeller went on to say that ����ä������ä����� is actively looking to eliminate plastic polybags altogether. “We recognize that product packed in individual polybags is problem and we are working on solutions to address it. We have tested shipping without polybags and are using those learnings to determine how to adapt our operations for polybag-free product.”

What Can the Outdoor Industry Do About the Polybag Problem?

Polybags are so ubiquitous, so affordable, and so good at what they do, which is protect goods for shipping in a lightweight manner. That’s why tackling the problem can feel so daunting. But there are tangible ways your brand can make a difference.

Find Alternative Solutions

PrAna has been a leader in the packaging movement for some time and pioneered a roll-packing technique that is getting noticed. Roll-packing entails tying rolled garments with recyclable twine or raffia and shipping them in master cartons. Employing that technique got the company to 80 percent plastic-free, but there were certain garments in the line that didn’t lend themselves to roll-packing, so prAna went in search of a polybag alternative. They found the answer in glassine, a durable paper bag that is curbside recyclable.

Other brands have followed suit, like Livsn Designs, which not only adopted roll-packing, but also revamped their entire hang tag program, replacing plastic-coated tags and plastic fasteners with recyclable paper and twine.��

Jewelry and belt brand Lilo Collections developed its own variation on roll-packing which it calls “burrito packing.” Burrito packing involves wrapping the item in paper like a burrito. The company also includes a hand-written note on each burrito like “Please recycle this paper” or “Thank you for being plastic-free with us.”  

Keep Polybags Inside the B2B Environment

Matt Gowar, owner of Rab and Lowe Alpine, believes that outdoor brands need to be accountable for their polybag waste. Gowar recently completed an exhaustive 18-month pilot program of his own in partnership with the European Outdoor Group.��

“The outdoor industry needs to keep the plastic polybags we use for shipping inside the B2B environment and not put it out there into the consumer world [or the retail landscape], where the recycling wheels fall off the truck,” he recently told ���ϳԹ��� Business Journal. “Distribution centers need to remove plastic packaging and sell it to local recyclers. When a big retailer like REI imposes a plastic tax on brands, it’s backwards. Polybags are a valuable commodity that need to be respected and repurposed.”

Decking company Trex firmly agrees. Trex buys soft film (#2 and #4 clear, color, or print polyethylene films) by the pound and uses it to make decking material. The average 500-square foot composite Trex deck contains 140,000 recycled plastic bags, making Trex one of the largest plastic bag recyclers in the U.S.

“By recycling with Trex, groups like Eco-Cycle can be confident they are making a difference by helping divert thousands of pounds of polyethene plastic waste from landfills so it can be repurposed into eco-friendly composite decking made from 95 percent recycled materials,” said Jeremy Bouley, regional recycling account representative for Trex. “One plastic bag or newspaper sleeve at a time, we are teaching communities how to protect and preserve their environment and build a more sustainable future for generations to come.”

Switch to Smaller, Lighter, Recycled Polybags

All polybags are not created equal: they range in thickness, size, and recycled content. “Brands should be examining the type of polybags they’re using,” said Christian. “Best practices entail opting for bags that are made with 100 percent recycled plastic, that are as small in size as they can be to get the job done, and that are as thin as possible.”

Retailers Take Action

Independent retailers bear a huge brunt of our industry’s polybag problem. With every shipment of new product they receive, they have to unbag each individual item and dispose of the plastic. Most retailers do not have the means to recycle them locally, as soft film plastic is not typically handled by municipal recycling facilities.

Nate Porter, owner of Salida Mountain Sports, couldn’t take it any more so he went in search of a solution. “I went to the local Walmart because they collect “shopping bags’ and asked if I could add my polybags to their collection bins,” said Porter. The manager agreed to let  Porter bring in clean #1 and #2 polybags, which he does each week. The problem is, Porter has no visibility as to what actually happens to those bags. It’s a leap of faith, and Porter hopes that the bags do actually get recycled. “It’s the best I can do at this time,” said Porter. “But it’s my fervent hope that our vendors stop sending polybag shipments and capture and recycle the bags at their own distribution centers. They should be responsible for recycling them, not us retailers.”

Call to Action

The Plastic Impact Alliance and Eco-Cycle are searching for at least ten independent outdoor specialty retailers who are willing to help us keep collecting data over a period of three months. Retailers are subjected to mountains of polybags, often with no local means of recycling them. The ask is this: tally (either by weight or quantity) the amount of polybags you receive from each brand you work with. The project will provide virtual training to help retailers understand the process and make it as easy as possible.��

The Plastic Impact Alliance will use this data to generate awareness in the outdoor industry and build relationships with recycling partners around the country. To get involved, contact Kate Christian at katec@ecocycle.org.

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It’s no secret that our industry has a polybag problem. While many brands are looking at alternatives to curb the glaring plastic waste—and some, like prAna and NEMO, have already changed their packaging practices—progress is slow. Plus, while technically recyclable, polybags are neither accepted curbside nor widely taken at recycling centers. Hence the reason proliferating mounds of discarded plastic pouches end up in the trash every day. Here, we take a closer look at the problem—and a better way forward.

Growth Factor

Plastic packaging and containers account for 40 percent of global plastic produced, and our appetite for them seemingly knows no bounds. Here’s how much (in tons) we’ve been making in the U.S.

1960: 120K

1980: 3.4M

2000: 11.2M

2010: 13.7M

2018: 14.5M

E-Commerce Eco-Problems

It’s hard to ignore the rising digital shopping trend—especially for outdoor brands that have seen a spike in interest juxtaposed with limited in-person retail throughout the pandemic. This is how much plastic packaging waste we can expect to see from global e-commerce if we don’t change things now.

2021: 2.66B lbs

2022: 3.03B lbs

2023: 3.45B lbs

2024: 3.95B lbs

2025: 4.53B lbs

Carbon Count

Every day in 2019, global polyethylene consumption accounted for 772,603 tons of carbon emissions. Capturing that single day’s worth of emissions would require roughly 38.63 million trees growing for a year.

That means removing a year’s worth of emissions would require more than 14 billion trees.

Recycling Reality

9: Percentage of global plastic waste that has ever been recycled

14: Percentage of U.S. plastic packaging that is recycled now

69: Percentage of U.S. plastic packaging that ends up in a landfill

180 Billion: Number of polybags the global fashion industry—which includes textiles and products in the outdoor industry—uses annually (that’s equivalent to the weight of 80,000 elephants)

So Why Do Outdoor Brands Even Need Polybags?

It’s about weighing the cost of ruined clothes.

30: Percentage of garments that were damaged beyond sellability when Patagonia conducted an experiment by running items through the shipping system at its Reno distribution center without polybags.

5: Percentage of a garment’s carbon footprint for which a polybag accounts. Meaning (by some logic): the environmental impact of throwing away a damaged garment far outweighs the impact of using a polybag.

Alternative Rhinking

Petro-based materials aren’t the only options. Check out what these forward-looking brands are using.

Paper: Surf-inspired apparel brand Outerknown ditched virgin plastic in favor of Vela bags, made from durable, transparent paper that’s biodegradable and recyclable curbside. Thus far, Vela bags have replaced 105,039 pounds of plastic polybags.

A rolling fold, plus raffia: Longtime sustainability pioneer prAna hit its zero-plastic goal in 2021 by using a roll-pack method for 70 percent of its garments and securing them with recyclable raffia ties. (The rest is shipped in Vela paper bags.)

Cornstarch: Fishing gear and apparel company Grundéns uses 100 percent biodegradable polybags made from a polylactide derived from cornstarch. Cut into strips, the bag can be composted curbside and will decompose in under a year.

Accountability Actions

The Plastic Impact Alliance (a coalition of more than 430 outdoor companies and the brainchild of OBJ editor Kristin Hostetter) teamed up with the nonprofit Eco-Cycle to launch a three-month pilot program in late 2021 to collect, quantify, and recycle polybags from outdoor retailers in Boulder, Colorado.

By the end of the pilot, the group collected 74,500 polybags, accounting for 901 total pounds of plastic �ڰ��dz���11 participating outdoor businesses (including ���ϳԹ���, OBJ’s parent company). Those bags are being recycled by Trex, a company that manufactures wood-alternative composite decking.

Sources: EPA, Oceana, Statista, Climate Neutral Group, Lonely Whale Foundation, Eco-Cycle.

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A small, women-led consulting service is making waves in sustainability across multiple industries. Planet+Purpose Solutions (PPS), a Charleston, South Carolina-based consultancy led by Lia Colabello, works directly with brands to help them reduce their plastic waste.

Colabello, PPS’s managing principal, first started the consultancy as Plastic Pollution Solutions at the end of 2016. Over the course of five years, the organizations has seen a steady increase in clients, becoming a public benefit corporation and changing its name to Planet+Purpose Solutions along the way.

So far, Colabello and her team have brought their tailored solutions not just to outdoor brands, but also to fashion companies like Costa Sunglasses and cultural institutions like Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium. Colabello has been a key player in the Plastic Impact Alliance since it was founded in early 2019, initiating trade show activations, brainstorming on ideas and action plans, and supporting the Alliance with her clients.

PPS takes a holistic approach to working with brands on their sustainability. “Essentially, a client will come to us and say, ‘We need to solve for x,’” Colabello told ���ϳԹ��� Business Journal.

“X” could be anything related to sustainability, from achieving different climate certifications to reducing carbon output. Whatever the goal, the PPS team customizes a unique action plan for each of its clients.��

“Outdoor brands often know what sustainability objectives they have to meet,” Colabello said. “However, sustainability may not be the specialty of anyone on their leadership teams, so it can be very overwhelming.”

How the Process Works

PPS’ process is fairly straightforward. First, the organization makes sure that key stakeholders at the client brand are all aligned on a particular set of goals. Then PPS builds out a strategy to support short-term goals, with the intention of eventually meeting long-term targets.

“We always go back to the question of how we can meld your sustainability strategy with a brand’s purpose so that it sticks,” Colabello said.

This strategy helps to ensure a consistent vision in all departments of a client company.

“It helps each team within a company to understand that this is the company’s goal, this is how your piece of the pie fits, and this is the impact you can have,” said Corey Clark, PPS’s project sustainability manager. “There’s a lot of fear [at brands] around greenwashing and climate fatigue at this point. Instilling the idea of progress, rather than perfection, is important.”

The long-term goal for PPS is to help clients reach B Corp certification through small, achievable steps. For some, that means adhering to REI’s Product Impact standards, or becoming Climate Neutral Certified, or simply focusing on the reduction of carbon and waste.

Success in Multiple Industries

Recent wins for PPS and its clients include helping Nuun Hydration achieve Climate Neutral Certification through “trickle-down sustainability,” whereby the manufacturing, operations, and shipping processes are evaluated and optimized for sustainability. The group also worked with Costa Sunglasses to pioneer the Kick Plastic initiative, which has eliminated 3 million single-use plastic bottles and recycled over four tons of plastic lenses.��Through the Plastic Impact Alliance, Colabello and her team helped Outdoor Retailer eliminate an estimated 500 single-use plastic bottles from its summer 2021 show.��

Now PPS’s goal is to bring client companies together to make industry-wide change. With PPS’s work in pet food, makeup, and fashion, as well as the outdoor industry, it has built a network of connections upon which to build a larger platform.

“With our years of building connections, we can now bring people from all these industries together to amplify a single message,” Clark said.

2022 is shaping up to be PPS’s biggest year yet. The group is expanding its team to meet demand from across multiple industries, as well as taking on larger roles at existing client companies.

“Most leaders don’t know how to start,” Colabello said. “They just know what’s expected of them by different external forces. That’s where we come in.”

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Like many of life’s bold ideas, it started with a beer.��

The team at Gnarly Nutrition—a sports nutrition company based in Salt Lake City—had been discussing ways to adopt sustainable packaging for years. But it wasn’t until April 2019, when Shannon O’Grady, the company’s chief procurement officer, cracked open a can of beer with a peel-off lid, that inspiration finally struck.

“That was what sparked an early discussion with [Gnarly CEO] Eli Kerr about looking at metal packaging,” O’Grady told ���ϳԹ��� Business Journal.

Beginning in late September, the Plastic Impact Alliance member started to switch all of its sports supplement packaging from plastic to recycled steel. The design the company settled on is made of highly recyclable tin-coated steel and looks like a small paint can. Besides being recyclable, the cans are also hermetically sealed, meaning they preserve freshness just as well as environment-killing plastic.��

Finding a Sustainable Solution

The dual benefits of sustainability and quality maintenance that Gnarly achieved with the new packaging outdid the many other options the company had tried before. They had looked at compostable and biodegradable packaging, but O’Grady explained that they found those unfeasible for a company their size. Additionally, most so-called “biodegradable” packaging is pretty tough to dispose of. It can’t be composted at home—instead, consumers must send it to special industrial compost sites, where the bags only break down under intense heat and pressure. Most people, seeing the “biodegradable” label on the packaging, just toss it in the trash, where it ends up in landfills.

“A lot of the compostable materials available to companies our size don’t maintain product quality well enough,” she said.

When the company finally found its steel solution, making the switch wasn’t easy. First came the upfront costs for buying the packaging itself.��

“For small businesses, what’s scarier than the cost per unit is the minimum order quantity,” O’Grady said. “We had to invest in a lot more packaging than we’ve ever purchased before, and that ends up as more of a hurdle.”

Coupled with that ordering hurdle, the unit price also increased with the switch to steel, which meant that Gnarly was forced to raise its prices for the first time in its nine-year history.��Rather than fear the change, however, CEO Eli Kerr is optimistic about the company’s new path.��

“We believe so much in the solution of creating more sustainability in our packaging, and we believe our customers share those values,” he said.��

An Eye to the Future

Though the company has only recently taken this huge sustainability step, Gnarly is already making plans to increase its sustainability more in the future.��

“By no means do we think we’ve found the perfect solution,” O’Grady said. “We realize it’s a point on the path and not an endpoint.” 

Beyond packaging, the company envisions a closed-loop system that might be developed some time in the future, where customers can return their empty tins to be sanitized and reused. If Gnarly can pull that off, they’d be limiting packaging waste altogether.

The brand is also looking for ways to eliminate plastic from all other elements of its products. From all of its products that still come in (recyclable) plastic bags, to the plastic scoop that comes in every can, certain parts of the business’s line still rely on plastic, and the team is having ongoing conversations about ways they can improve even further.��

As for others in the supplement industry, Gnarly is aware of how deeply plastic has permeated the supply chain.��

“You walk into a GNC and it’s a sea of plastic tubs,” said Kerr. “You walk into a Whole Foods and it’s a ton of plastic bags that aren’t even recyclable. This is a discouraging process. But the fact that we found a solution that maintains the integrity of our product, looks good, and is much more sustainable than plastic shows other brands that it’s possible. I hope they’re encouraged by it.”

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In the back rooms of retail shops all over the country, mountains of plastic polybags are piling up every day. Whenever a new shipment arrives from a vendor, there’s always a sense of excitement at unboxing time: cool, new stuff has been delivered and the employees are eager to get it out onto the floor.

Then a grim reality sets in: nearly every item—from apparel to accessories to hard goods—comes encased in a polybag. And that polybag needs to be disposed of.��

Polybags are not easy to recycle, which is why most towns don’t. Yet so many polybags come printed with the recycling symbol, which is deceptive and counterproductive. When consumers see that symbol, they assume the bag is safe to toss into their single-stream recycling bin. This “wishcycling” results in clogged machinery at the sorting facilities.

The outdoor industry is well aware of its polybag problem and many companies have made steps to move away from them. PrAna has nixed them altogether and pioneered a new roll-packing method. Grunden’s has sourced a home-compostable paper bag that it now uses for its apparel. NEMO has done away with plastic tent pole bags.��

Cutting ties with polybags is not easy. The thin film is very effective at protecting items from liquid and dirt during transit. Polybags are cheap and widely available throughout virtually all supply chains.

The Plastic Impact Alliance, a coalition of more than 430 outdoor companies intent on eliminating single-use plastic from their businesses, and Eco-Cycle, one of the largest non-profit recyclers and Zero Waste organizations in the U.S., have just launched a three-month pilot program in Boulder, Colorado, to collect, recycle, and quantify the polybags accumulated from 11 outdoor businesses along the Pearl Street Mall.��

“Eco-Cycle is excited to support the commitment of our partners in the outdoor industry to develop an effective and efficient model of recovering polybags from retail settings,” said Kate Christian, corporate sustainability manager at Eco-Cycle. “This pilot will explore a novel bicycle-based collection system which minimizes environmental impacts and costs in hopes of establishing a replicable example of zero-emission collections.”

How the Pearl St. Polybag Pilot Works

Once a week, two (paid) students from Boulder High School will pedal a custom trailer from store to store and collect the polybags. The students will deliver them to ���ϳԹ��� Inc.’s new Pearl St. headquarters for storage. Once a month, Eco-Cycle trucks will collect the bags and take them to the Eco-Cycle/City of Boulder Center for Hard-to-Recycle Materials (CHaRM). There, Eco-Cycle will catalog data about polybag generation rates, bale them, and send them to Trex. Trex uses polybags as the primary feedstock in producing their line of composite decking, a long-lasting product that does not require treatment with toxic chemicals, and simultaneously decreases the burden on hardwood trees like redwoods and cedars that are typically used to construct decks and piers.

“We will use the data we gather from the pilot to guide the development of polybag recycling efforts across retail brands’ operating footprints,” said Christian.��

The businesses committed to the pilot are all members of the Plastic Impact Alliance: Artilect, Backcountry, Black Diamond, ����ä������ä�����, Helly Hansen, Himali, Norrona, ���ϳԹ��� Inc., Patagonia, Sherpani, and Stio.

“Every single Plastic Impact Alliance member I speak with has ambitions to find polybag alternatives in the long term,” said PIA co-founder Kristin Hostetter. “Some companies are already there, some have just barely started the journey, and we’ve got everything in between. In the meantime, though, the polybags are piling up at retail shops across the country. With this pilot program, we hope to put some numbers on the problem, and as a result encourage brands to step on the gas and work together to find solutions. And of course, we will also divert a whole lot of plastic from the landfill during the three month period.”

Some large national retailers (like REI, Patagonia, and The North Face) already collect and properly recycle polybags at their retail locations. But the many hundreds of independent specialty outdoor retailers around the country simply don’t have the resources to do so.

“It’s a massive problem,” said Nate Porter, founder of Salida Mountain Sports in Colorado. “Sometimes the mountain of plastic waste we have to deal with after a shipment is received takes up more space than the shipment itself. And we are not equipped to properly recycle the stuff. As an industry we need to find more sustainable alternatives to polybags.”

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The bold lettering stamped on the front of prAna’s plastic-free garment bags is confident, but cautious.

“This Is A Test…” the bags declare, explaining that prAna is experimenting with methods of shipping that don’t require plastic polybags. It’s a declaration that could characterize the company’s journey for the past decade, a crusade on plastic sparked by a single photo. Now, the time for testing is over. For prAna, this fall marks the beginning of a new era.

Beginning in August, Plastic Impact Alliance member prAna is using 100 percent plastic-free packaging across the entirety of its operations. That means garments arrive at customers’ doors with no plastic polybags, hang tags, or fasteners.

“We’ve left no stone unturned trying to eliminate plastic,” said Rachel Lincoln, prAna’s director of sustainability. “Reaching that 100 percent mark has been such a long time coming.”

A Decade Gaining Ground

By now, you may have heard the story that birthed more than a decade of dedication to cutting plastic in prAna’s operations. If you haven’t, it goes like this.

In 2010, at a prAna retail store in Boulder, Colorado, employees had spent the day unboxing products to put on the shelves. With every product came a plastic polybag, which the team piled up in a corner until the mound of plastic became a mountain. The day came to a close, and the store’s manager sent a photo of the plastic pileup to prAna headquarters along with a single question: “What do you expect us to do with all of this plastic?”

“It gave us a moment of pause,” Lincoln said. “We’re over here trying to do the right thing, trying to make responsible products, trying to use organic cotton and recycled polyester, and we hadn’t thought about the packaging.”

The company brought together staff from every department to figure out how to avoid creating more mountains of plastic. Roll-packing—tying rolled garments with recyclable twine or raffia and shipping them in master cartons—became the packaging method of choice. The change brought prAna’s packaging to 80 percent plastic-free, but certain garments—those with unstable dyes or heightened susceptibility to weather damage—still required the protection that individual polybags provided.

Enter the “This Is A Test…” bag.

Paper That Performs Like Plastic

To cut out individual polybags altogether, prAna turned to a paper product called glassine. The FSC-certified alternative is curbside-recyclable, 100 percent biodegradable, and made from wood pulp, just like regular paper.

“The [sustainability] team brainstormed how to convert a plastic polybag into a paper bag version,” Lincoln said. “We found the solution in the glassine paper bag.”

Glassine is produced using a method similar to standard paper, according to sustainable packaging company EcoEnclose. Wood pulp is bleached, spread on mats, and run through cylindrical presses called calenders. To produce glassine paper, sheets are ‘supercalendered’—run through the calendering process several times at different temperatures and pressures. The treatment results in an incredibly strong, dense paper with very little porosity, making it difficult for water and other contaminants to penetrate.

Between roll-packing and introducing the glassine bags, prAna has eliminated over 20 million polybags from its distribution process since 2010. Though some customers may worry about product safety after the switch away from highly-protective polybags, Lincoln is quick to put those concerns to rest.

“We don’t get returns because of dirty or damaged products due to packaging,” Lincoln said. “We can’t quantify it because it doesn’t happen.”

Welcoming Industry Competitors

This month also marks the first anniversary of prAna’s Responsible Packaging Movement (RPM), an effort urging brands in the outdoor industry to cut plastic and virgin forest fibers out of company packaging. Though many of the brands involved in RPM are direct competitors to prAna, Lincoln highlights the “pre-competitive space” that issues like sustainability occupy in the industry.

“The Responsible Packaging Movement was founded on that concept of collaboration,” Lincoln said. “How can we bring everybody together, share knowledge, and rise all boats?”

Currently, over 80 brands—including Burton, Hoka, and GSI Outdoors—are signed on to the movement, which provides education and space for the sharing of information and advancements in sustainability. Interested parties can email ​​prana_sustainability@prana.com to ask questions or join the movement themselves.

Plastic is still all but ubiquitous in the outdoors industry, but Lincoln hopes that prAna can be a model for brands looking to take steps towards plastic reduction.

“[Plastic elimination] is completely feasible,” Lincoln said. “Automation in companies’ distribution centers is still based around plastic, so there’s a bit of an unravel that needs to happen. There might be some retrofitting, but it’s feasible.”

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Two years ago, Florian Palluel hit a crossroads. His employer, the France-based company Picture Organic Clothing, had emerged as a sustainability-driven player in the outdoor industry, building technical snow and surf apparel from recycled and organic materials while maintaining a minimal carbon footprint. The company had even secured B Corp certification, a status reserved for businesses that meet the highest standard of social and environmental performance. But, as Picture’s newly elected sustainability manager, Palluel had found a significant crack in his company’s green exterior. “We were honestly not that good on packaging,” he said.

Like many companies in the outdoor space, Picture relied heavily on plastic polybags to protect its products in transit. For Palluel, it was a harsh realization that Picture, despite its sustainability efforts, was actually contributing to one of the industry’s stickiest problems.

He began to research packaging alternatives, contacting larger outdoor companies like prAna and tentree that were already on their own sustainable-packaging journeys. Both had opted to roll-pack their soft goods, then pack multiples into a large master polybag instead of individually wrapping them, which helped each company drastically reduce single-use plastic waste in its packaging. But roll-packing requires human intervention, training, and tends to cut into efficiency—and therefore profit—which is why it’s not more widely adopted.

In 2018, REI released its Product Impact Standards, challenging outdoor companies to step up their sustainability efforts across the board, or be left out of REI storefronts. For Picture, the call to action couldn’t have been louder.

Within a year the company had its own system in place, combining the roll-pack method with a third-party package reuse company. So far, the brand has reduced its polybag use by 53 percent, while removing 425,000 polybags from its supply chain. Palluel acknowledges that there’s still plenty of work left to do.

“When you want to remove polybags, it can’t be done overnight,” Palluel said. “It’s a process.”

For prAna, that process has been over a decade in the making. The clothing company first pledged to eliminate polybags back in 2010 and estimates that it has taken over 20 million plastic bags out of the supply chain during that time, according to prAna Director of Sustainability Rachel Lincoln. Still, the company has since realized that its individual impact isn’t enough to curb the problem—it needed to get other brands on board.

“We should be sharing our secret sauce with other brands wanting to make the switch to responsible packaging,” Lincoln said.

Collaboration is Key

Driven by that desire, prAna started the Responsible Packaging Movement (RPM) in August 2020. RPM offers members educational resources like how-to guides and a live speaker series to help brands like Picture start their own shifts toward sustainable packaging. There are currently 77 brands that have joined RPM from the outdoor industry and beyond.

RPM isn’t the only show in town. The Plastic Impact Alliance (PIA) launched in 2019 after Kristin Hostetter (editorial director of ���ϳԹ��� Business Journal) wrote an editor’s note about the outdoor industry’s plastic waste problem at Outdoor Retailer. The letter sparked so much interest that she decided to form a coalition of brands to share ideas and bring about change. The PIA currently has more than 400 members—companies across the outdoor industry dedicated to eliminating plastic waste from their businesses.

Last summer, PIA members exhibiting at Outdoor Retailer hosted 170 water stations around the show floor and found reusable solutions for their in-booth show events, nixing untold plastic bottles from the show floor. And a new, private PIA LinkedIn forum serves as a place where members can collaborate, share, and brainstorm solutions. “Water bottles and cups at trade shows were the low-hanging fruit,” Hostetter said. “Packaging—and in particular polybags—is much harder to eliminate. But the problem is real. Retailers have sent me photos of mountains of polybags they get saddled with every time a shipment comes in.”

PIA member NEMO recently launched an innovative partnership with DAC (also a member), dubbed the 100K Polybag Elimination Project, to replace the polybags that encase tent poles with reusable Repreve fabric ones. Both companies are hoping the initiative takes off—Big Agnes, Hilleberg, and REI are already in talks with DAC. Next up for NEMO is tackling the larger polybags used to ship sleeping bags.

There are plenty of other brands reimagining the way goods travel. Picture has teamed up with Finnish shipping company RePack to help recapture packaging from consumers instead of tossing more garbage into landfills. Picture buys the packaging from RePack and provides postage for consumers to send empty packages back to RePack, where it is sold back to Picture, essentially “closing the loop” and using far less energy than traditional recycling, said Palluel. Toad&Co has been using a similar reusable shipping bag (LimeLoop) since 2018.

But an even bigger challenge lies beyond direct-to-consumer shipping. After all, most product reaches the U.S. wrapped in polybags from manufacturing centers in Asia and Europe.

“We told our factory in Turkey that if the bigger brands like prAna can make the shift away from plastic packaging, there’s no reason for Picture not to do it as well,” Palluel said. And it worked.

Raising the Bar

The industry-wide accountability established by RPM and PIA is proving to be a powerful driver of change, but the outdoor industry is also targeting change at the legislative level. PrAna and other outdoor brands have begun working with 5 Gyres—a nonprofit dedicated to ending global plastic pollution—to demand legal action.

The nonprofit helped introduce the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act of 2020 in Congress, an act that forces companies producing plastics to either develop sustainable end-of-life solutions for plastics or turn away from them altogether. The act didn’t pass in 2020, but was reintroduced in 2021 backed by over 400 environmental advocacy groups. Congress is set to vote on it later this year.

“We are definitely headed in the right direction,” Lincoln said. “Both brands and manufacturers want this change—unraveling the system will just take time.”

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Day Two dawned hot and hazy, with smoke from the Oregon fires raising air quality alert into the moderate range. But that didn’t stop attendees from taking to the water and trails to test out the latest in paddlesports and cycling gear.

Show directors expected a bigger retail turnout today, but most exhibitors didn’t seem to feel that panned out. Still, everyone we spoke with seemed please with the show overall—with the venue, the outdoor format, the social distancing, and the authenticity all being key elements that have attendees jazzed.

Education sessions were pulling in small but engaged groups of attendees. The sessions all had an intimate feel, with lots of interaction, questions, and comments from the audience, as moderators passed the mikes around encouraged a free exchange of ideas (more on education sessions below).

Retailer Hot Takes

“I’m a total newbie to trade shows and this industry. I opened my shop four months ago during the pandemic and 90 percent of the stuff I ordered I never saw in person, so it’s been great to see these brands and products. To get out of my bubble and meet a lot of retailers who are successful has been really encouraging and inspiring. I’m learning about different strategies and seeing what’s possible.” —Mandela Echefu, owner, Wheelzup ���ϳԹ���s in Cumberland, Maryland.

“I haven’t written any orders yet, but I will before it’s over. I decided to bring in a raft company, Aire, so that’s new. I like this show. To me it feels like Outdoor Retailer 30 years ago in Tahoe.”—Ed Mcalister, owner, River Sports Outfitters in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Exhibitor Hot Takes

“I love the event atmosphere and location. Retailer traffic has been a little slow, but we’ve talked to a few quality people and some new people, which has been good. And we’ve written a few orders, which is even better. That’s what we’re here for. I believe this will be a good venue for hard goods.” —Dave Cozzone, vice president, Princeton Tec

“The quality of the connection has been great. Traffic may be a little bit on the lighter side, but I think the show has a lot of potential. It’s run really well. It’s just been good to connect with the community again. It feels authentic and it feels fun and the vibe is right. Our main purpose here was to showcase the new bike products we have coming out in the fall. We have some really good leads to follow up on.” —Supriya Limaye, chief officer of fun, Peak Design

Hot New Products

There was plenty of new gear on display at Day Two of the show. Here a few of the fresh, innovative goodies that caught our eye.

PurTrek Trek Pole and Water Filtration System

Ever looked down at your trekking poles on the trail and thought, I wish these did something else? Apparently, the people behind PurTrek—based in Ogden, Utah—did. The company’s Trek Pole & Water Filtration System, new this spring, combines traditional hiking poles with a built-in water filter for rehydrating in the backcountry. We stopped by PurTrek’s booth for a quick demonstration. More info on the product can be found on the company’s website.

Cotopaxi Cielo

Cotopaxi has officially announced its first fully sealed waterproof jacket, the Cielo ($145-155), available in men’s and women’s. The move marks a step forward for the Salt Lake City-based brand, which until now has only offered water resistant options in its outerwear line.

Ignik FireCan

Personal heating brand Ignik is coming out with its first fire can, simply dubbed the FireCan, this fall. The design is inspired by a traditional “groover”—an ammo can repurposed as a portable toilet in the backcountry. Ignik founder Graeme Esarey explained the design process like so: “We started looking at groovers and thought, here’s this ordinary object—an ammo can—that has been reimagined to perform this really hard job. Why can’t we take the same concept and bring it into our word of personal heating?” In addition to being compact and durable, the FireCan is capable of sending up flames two feet high, and is completely forest-safe (i.e. fire ban approved) due to the foldable legs that raise it off the ground. Available this fall exclusively at REI, with wider distribution to follow in Spring ’22.

Education Sessions

Education sessions continued today with topics deeply relevant to hardgoods dealers: “The Pain Points of Paddle Shops,” “eBikes: Finance, Government Engagement, and Takeaways for New Retailers,” “Five Ways to Grow Online Sales,” and more.

Show director Kenji Haroutunian told OBJ that he’s already gotten an outpouring of appreciation from retailers due to the sessions’ intimate nature. Rather than jam-packed conference rooms, the education sessions at The Big Gear Show have so far been small and casual, with only a couple dozen attendees per event. That has given retailers time to ask lots of questions, Haroutunian said, engaging with presenters in deeper conversations than they might otherwise get.

First Time Around the Block?

Over the course of the day, we ran into several exhibitors who are brand new to the industry, making themselves known at trade shows for the first time. Here are a couple of the standout companies we interacted with.

Cedaero

Minnesota-based bikepacking brand Cedaero, founded in 2017, is a company of “adventurers, nomads, bike nerds, and gear junkies,” according to the team. The crew drove cross-country in a repurposed ambulance to make it out to Utah for the show this week. Bike-mounted bags and other travel accessories make up this quirky company’s wares.

GiantMouse

Michigan-based startup GiantMouse came to the show with some of the most beautiful Danish-designed camping knives we’ve ever seen. Featuring both fixed blades and foldables, the company hopes to make a name for itself in a product category where legacy companies like Filson control much of the game.

As of the morning of Day Two, the company hadn’t written any orders. “We just came to meet people and get our name out there,” said founder and CEO Jim Wirth. “For us, this show is all about raising awareness of the brand.”

Reducing Plastic Bottle Use

Plastic Impact Alliance members are out in full force across the show. Sporting PIA signs and Yeti water stations, these champions of sustainability are doing their part to reduce single-use plastics while keeping people hydrated at the same time.

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In the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle stands a four-story, dark wood building with lots of windows. The Pacific Northwest sun shines down on a rooftop succulent garden and a deck of solar panels. The building is the new U.S. headquarters of waterproofing and aftercare company Nikwax, and like all of Nikwax’s products, it was designed with sustainability in mind.

“Sustainability is a big focus for us,” said Heidi Allen, vice president of marketing at Nikwax. “We wanted to land in an office that encompassed those values, and also offered our employees a good place to work.”

The new headquarters, which employees began using in March 2021, runs completely on renewable energy. Behind those full-length windows and dark wood, Allen and her team works on another sustainability goal: cutting plastic consumption. From the milk jugs in the office fridge to the company’s manufacturing sites across the U.S. and Europe, Nikwax is scrutinizing every piece of plastic in its supply chain.

Banishing Virgin Plastic

Nikwax is in the middle of a multi-year crusade against virgin plastic. In 2018, the company conducted a corporate plastic footprint survey to identify where virgin plastic in its supply chain was coming from and how best to reduce its overall plastic consumption across operations. The report investigated every inch of Nikwax’s plastic use.

“We had two main areas that we wanted to address: reducing the use of virgin plastics we took in, and reducing the single-use plastic that we put back out into the world,” Allen said.

Most of the product Nikwax makes come in liquid form—the company is known for its waterproofing solutions—so bottles are necessary for transport and consumer use. According to the report, bottles accounted for 68 percent of Nikwax’s total plastic use, the remaining percentages coming largely from packaging tape, spray heads, and bottle caps.��

Finding an alternative to virgin plastic for these bottles was the company’s first goal. Nikwax landed on recycled plastic for its new bottles; the company also considered plant-based plastics, but worried about the damage to the environment both from the feedstock the plastics are derived from and their end-of-life. Bioplastics perform similarly in the environment to virgin plastic, as environmental engineer Jenna Jambeck detailed in National Geographic’s examination of bioplastics. If it ends up in the ocean, a plant-based plastic bag might fragment, but won’t break down.

After determining that it would use recycled plastic, Nixwax faced a new challenge. The company needed a supplier to produce bottles made completely from recycled plastic but the bottles also had to fit into Nikwax’s production infrastructure.��

“Trying to find alternatives that fit with our existing filling systems and such was a big pain point,” Allen said.

Nikwax eventually partnered with Dutch manufacturing company Flestic B.V., and results were immediate. In the company’s first year after the footprint report, Nikwax saved 170 tons of virgin plastic—enough to fill more than 2,000 garbage bags or about 20 20-yard dumpsters.��

Switching the bottles to recycled material cut a massive chunk of the company’s virgin plastic intake, and there are more cutbacks ahead. By the end of 2021, Nikwax expects 90 percent of the plastic it uses to be recycled.��

The Road to 90 Percent

The biggest step towards that goal will be switching bottle caps, which account for about 20 percent of Nikwax’s plastic use, to recycled plastic. The company needed to figure out how to make the colored caps with the grey-tinted recycled plastic while keeping the color specs the same, but Nikwax expects to get there by the end of this year. At the same time, the company is also examining its crannies—searching for minor sources of plastic to change or eliminate, such as moving from plastic packing tape to paper-based.

Because the liquid product ships in bottles, Nikwax is generally able to avoid using polybags—those clear plastic bags that pose one of the outdoor industry’s biggest waste issues. Unfortunately, there’s a big exception: certain distribution companies, including Amazon, require Nikwax to encase its products in polybags anyway. In these instances, Nikwax turns to commercially compostable polybags to avoid using virgin plastic.

“It isn’t the best solution, because it does require municipal composting,” Allen said. “We tried to find the best available polybag solution that wasn’t virgin plastic.”

So-called “biodegradable” polybags present their own issues—the bags only break down under certain conditions, requiring specialized facilities to degrade fully. In the U.S., these commercial composting facilities are few and far between—according to a 2019 BioCycle report, only 185 exist across the country. Recently, companies have been experimenting with more sustainable solutions to the polybag question.

Continuing the Cycle

Ensuring plastics actually get recycled after they leave Nikwax’s facilities is the other side of the sustainability coin. Recyclability of outgoing materials inevitably relies on consumers to take initiative and recycle plastic themselves. Allen acknowledged that while emphasizing recyclability is important, recyclable plastics may only be as good as the awareness the company is able to instill in its customers.

“The bottles are recyclable, but we can’t come to your house and make you put it in the recycling bin,” Allen said.

The bottles carry a stamp on the label, letting customers know they are recycled and recyclable. It’s a visual reminder that Nikwax hopes will help the bottles end up back in circulation as recycled plastic.��

Nikwax’s current goal is to make 99 percent of the plastic leaving its facilities recyclable by 2023. The bottles, caps and spray heads are currently all recyclable, meaning much like the company’s intake of virgin plastic, the progress made toward this goal will be in minutiae like outgoing packaging tape, garbage bin liners and pens.��

For a company founded on the notion of sustainably extending the lifetime of gear, all this attention to plastics is logical, said Allen.��

“It aligns with our company’s focus on consumption reduction. Whether we’re talking about gear or plastics, we’re using less new material and less stuff ends up in landfills.” 

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Nemo’s journey to eliminate polybags began in 2019, on the floor of a distribution warehouse in Riverside, California.

Theresa Conn, the camping gear company’s global distribution and sustainability manager, had been called to the warehouse to look over a “transportation packaging audit.” With a handful of coworkers, Conn pulled boxes of items off shelves at random and looked inside. She was surprised to find vast inconsistencies: plastic banding was being used on lightweight boxes that didn’t require it, and polybags encased tents that had been safely shipped without them for years. Across the board, there was just too much waste.

“It was really eye-opening,” Conn said. “We thought, ‘If we’ve been shipping some products without polybags, and it’s been fine, why are we using [polybags] at all?’”

The realization sparked Nemo’s desire to get rid of polybags, culminating in the company’s latest plastic-removal initiative, the 100K Polybag Elimination Project. Starting in 2019, Nemo phased polybags out of the shipping process for all items except for its sleeping bags, which are at higher risk of moisture damage and require total protection from the elements. The program sets a “new transportation packaging standard” for the company, says Conn.

NEMO takes aim at polybags

Once the audit revealed that Nemo’s tents and other gear could be safely shipped without polybags, eliminating the outer bags was a no-brainer. It saved time (Nemo wouldn’t have to open the bags and remove the products before sending them to customers), money (15 to 20 cents per unit), and significantly slashed plastic waste in its supply chain. In 2020, Conn estimated Nemo saved one ton of plastic on its best-selling tent, the Hornet 2-Person, alone.

After doing away with the outer bags, Nemo set its sights on the inside of the tent roll. A polybag still encased each tent’s poles when the company received them from its supplier, South Korea-based Dac���ʴDZ���. Nemo coordinated back and forth with the manufacturer, challenging Dac to reimagine its own packaging.

“It was an uphill battle,” Conn said. “Dac is a huge supplier, and we’re getting bigger, but we’re not The North Face.”

For Nemo’s 2021 tent line, the partners landed on a solution: an undyed, uncoated pole bag made from Repreve fiber, a fabric crafted from recycled water bottles. This bag specifically is what inspired the 100K Polybag project name, as the bag will save Nemo 100,000 polybags over the first two years of the initiative. The project netted Nemo a Green Good Design 2021 award for Green Product.

The benefits to the initiative don’t begin and end with Nemo, though. Throughout the process of developing the new bag, Dac and Nemo tested methods of shipping tent poles, and found that in the vast majority of situations, polybags were unnecessary. Starting in July 2021, Dac will ship tent poles to certain partners without polybags.

Nemo was part of Dac’s first cohort to receive poles without polybags, along with sunshade maker Shibumi and tent manufacturers Hilleberg and Helsport. Currently, Dac is testing the program with Big Agnes and REI, with hopes to expand it to all of its partners—more than 40 companies including giants like The North Face and Mountain Hardwear.��

Nemo’s sustainable future

With single-use plastic polybags eliminated from Nemo’s tents, chairs and accessories, the company is setting its sights on solutions for its sleeping bags. Because most of its bags are down-filled, shipping them without any sort of moisture protection runs the risk of significant product damage.��

“Right now, we have emails bouncing around at Nemo about better ways to handle polybags for our sleeping bags,” Conn said.

At this point, the company is aiming to use polybags that contain recycled plastic and are recyclable, but Conn noted that a number of solutions are on the table. For the individual sleeping bags, Nemo is exploring options from compostable PLA bags—biodegradable bags made from plant compounds—to stone resin packaging, a waterproof cardboard substitute made by mixing resin with calcium carbonate. Additionally, the company is currently testing a shipping system that uses one master carton polybag instead of individual bags for sleeping bags, with hopes to implement the practice in 2022.

Conn also highlighted the importance of varied sustainability initiatives, including projects focused on emissions reduction and materials waste. She cited a 2016 Quantis/Textile Exchange Apparel CO2 footprint study which found that 98 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are created prior to product distribution; this stark picture of waste led Nemo to create the Chipper, a sitting pad made from recycled foam that—just over the past year—saved 8.8 tons of foam waste and 48 tons of CO2 emissions from foam incineration.

A major portion of Conn’s focus remains on emissions, but the plastic-focused initiatives NemoNemo has implemented over the past two years have demonstrated sustainability success.

“I think [reducing plastic waste] is an awesome entry point into sustainability for any brand,” Conn said. “The goal is to eliminate, eliminate, eliminate.”

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