Photo: Billabong
Surf and lifestyle brand Billabong recently announced the release of a new line of sustainable wetsuits. The collection, dubbed “Upcycler,” combines several means of recycling textiles to improve upon the eco-friendliness of a notoriously unsustainable product.
The program employs three major means of recycling and repurposing materials, as detailed in a press release posted by shop-eat-surf. The first is combining post-consumer textiles for jerseys and wetsuit liners. The second is taking post-consumer wetsuits and repurposing them into raw ingredients for internal rubber. Finally, the collection has shifted from synthetic rubber to a natural rubber sourced from the Hevea brasiliensis tree.
“At Billabong, we design, build and repair all of our products to be as durable and long-lasting as possible,” said Scott Boot, Global Director of Wetsuits at Liberated Brands, the brand’s operating partner for North American retail and e-commerce. “Unfortunately, products eventually do reach a point where they can no longer fulfill their duty but innovative solutions like upcycling old clothing and wetsuits eliminates the need for new/virgin petroleum fossil fuel derived materials and prevents them from entering landfills.”
Though the program is new to Billabong, the company is not the first to recycle wetsuits. Recently, Patagonia introduced a program that will repurpose used Yulex suits. Similarly to Billabong, the company partnered with Bolder Industries, which breaks down natural rubber to be made into carbon black, a material used to dye wetsuits and other materials. Since 2019, Vissla has offered its “Stoke Exchange” program, in which customers can send in used wetsuits to be upcycled into other consumer goods, such as yoga and changing mats.
