Carol Derby, Director of Environmental Strategy for Designtex
by Rich AwnCarol Derby is the Director of Environmental Strategy for Deisngtex, a company championing the movement toward the use and reuse of sustainable materials in commercial interiors. Under Carol’s direction, Designtex seeks to instill the potential for a closed loop system in its products. Early in the lifecycle of every material, there are opportunities to infuse environmental qualities, that by design, challenge each subsequent stage to preserve and amplify those qualities. This is the main focus of Carol’s work and what she calls Environmental Design.
GA: Are there any FTC regulations for sustainable fabrics?
CD: The FTC is actually working on their Green Guide update right now and I’ve attended a meeting where they were gathering all of the people who might fit into that lexicon so it’s a pretty diverse thing they’re trying to get their arms around because the Green Guides have to do with every green material in the world, not just textiles. But there is a category there that they’re trying to fine tune everything from what does it mean to be organic, what does recycled really mean, they’re really looking to protect the consumer.
GA: Can you explain the pros and the cons to say natural fibers versus synthetics and I may be oversimplifying it, I mean, I know you make fabrics out of audio tape.
CD: I think in the cradle to cradle model, they both can be celebrated as truly green materials. I’ve sometimes done this as a little workshop in a presentation to take a mechanical pencil, for instance, and a wood pencil and kind of go through what went into the manufacture of both of those things, where are they going at the end of their life, and it usually ends up being this sort of counter intuitive think. I mean, the mechanical pencil is so superior to the wood pencil because you can take that thing apart and technically you could refill it forever and the wood pencil suffers from certain things, what’s in that paint anyway and look how many pounds per pressure were involved in getting that graphite to that stage of fineness. When you put the two things side by side in a very very loose life cycle analysis, you start to see that maybe this assumption that we make about natural materials being always the better material aren’t necessarily so. I mean, manufacturing is manufacturing and how thoughtful you make it is what really constitutes sustainability.
GA: What are some programs at work here with Designtex that are on a local scale or a global scale?
CD: We are starting to look at this as a much broader responsibility and to track our footprint as best we can so we’re in the early stages of that but we are reclaiming samples from libraries, we’ve put word out there that those things can come back and we’re getting about a 20% return on samples these days.
GA: What happens when they come back?
CD: They go back into stock to be sent out on the next request so it keeps them from landfill. And some of the other things that we’re doing have to do with looking at our operations. We design but we also distribute so one of our heaviest footprints comes through out distribution arm so just trying to look at who are we using, what are their fleets like, are there hybrids in those fleets, how much time do those trucks spend idling. We were glad to learn that one of the biggest truckers that we use is part of the EPA’s SmartWay Program. So, we’re starting to starting to really spread the whole thing out and see that there are things that we can do on the distribution side. We have a product that goes out there and we need to be responsible for that product but we also need to be responsible for how we get the product out there.
GA: What is your history with bags made from bottles and the 2008 TED Conference?
CD: We had an opportunity working with a company called Rikshaw to develop fabrics for TED and we had just developed, actually the fabric that’s in this conference room is part of that collection, a group of fabrics that were made from PET plastic bottles, 100% post consumer polyester and it was really the first time that that kind of material was able to be reclaimed and used at this level of value, of this type of quality because prior to that the extrusion of those types of yarns was clunky, there was a lot of stuff to work out. We typically could get a certain type of construction but we couldn’t get a refined yarn dyed-jacquard, that these are. So, it was an opportunity, TED was an opportunity to really show off that quality and that new technology that made it possible to have 100% post-consumer polyester in bags.
GA: Now that we’re sitting here with this audio tape fabric, it’s this similar to how you would take a plastic bottle and, I mean, would you sort of stretch it out into thin strands and then weave it? What’s the process? I’m curious.
CD: The plastic from the bottles, when it’s reclaimed, is called bottle flake and it’s really no different from the resin that went into making the bottle initially. It’s graded a little bit cloudier than the bright clear plastic resin that went into the bottle but that resin can either be formed into a bottle or extruded as fiber. So, you’re not seeing plastic in these fabrics, you’re seeing fiber that doesn’t even look synthetic really because what happens is, through extruding really fine filaments and air-entangling them, you get a yarn.
GA: Can you comment on your “audible fabric” art installation?
CD: Well, the “audible fabric” is called “sonic fabric.” It’s really the work of Alyce Santoro, who came to us with this concept. She had developed this idea based on payer flags. Even from the idea of prayers being released by the wind, prior to that she had had these experiences sailing as a kid where she always imagined that the audio tape that she tied to determine the direction of the wind, would actually play that music into the wind, so there was all this rich context for her artwork. She wanted to commercialize this fabric and we weren’t sure we had anything durable that would work for our commercial markets but we were able to come up with a construction that met the requirements for durability and happily preserved the sound that Alice had recorded on the tape. I think there are seven tracks in all layered into the tape and the tape is reclaimed tape, or repurposed tape, that Alice located sitting in spools and warehouses unused, the audio tape market being what it is these days. That sound, then, was not greatly deteriorated by weaving which was a really happy circumstance. It is distorted sound and when you play it, which you can by doctoring up a walkman and turing the head to the outside, you get something that sounds kind of like whale sounds or very atmospheric whoops and bleeps but it’s all there.
GA: We’d seen some of the new line of these fabrics that are 30% polyester, 30% polyurethane. Now, those don’t sound like too green of a material. Can you explain how they’re either reclaimed or reprocessed, if you know anything about that?
CD: Sure. They are along a green continuum. We’re always starting with what are the best possible raw materials you could choose to give you the kind of performance you’re after. So, those are extreme performance fabrics, they’re 70% recycled polyester and 30% polyurethane and while the combination of those things alone, I agree, we wouldn’t normally say, “Well, that right there, that’s the recipe for a green fabric.” What it does do is replace material that we would not consider green, which is vinyl or PVC. So, by achieving the same performance without using PVC which has some downsides to it both on the manufacturing side and at the end of its life, real disposal problems for PVC. By substituting something that is water-based polyurethane on chief-value recycled polyester backing, you’ve gone the next step. It’s an incremental step towards sustainability. We’ve started to get much more cautious about using that word, “sustainable” or “sustainability,” because there are very few things that achieve that and that would be one of them and I would say is only taking the next step in that direction but it’s a big step.
Photos courtesy of Designtex.