The distributor of North Face in Japan is setting up a supply chain for renewable nylon fiber consisting of a Finnish renewable oil producer and two Japanese companies in the chemical and petroleum industries.
Goldwin Inc., an outerwear brand who is also the official distributor of North Face in Japan, said in a recent statement that it would be in charge with product and design development, eyeing a hard-shell jacket for North Face to be released in August.
After this release, the company said it would “consider the launch of further products and expand its use to other brands.”
Neste, a Finland-based energy company, will supply bio-naphtha, the renewable raw material, which will then be further processed by Idemitsu Kosan, a petroleum company, and Toray Industries, a chemical corporation that is also the world’s largest producer of carbon fiber. The entire supply chain will be managed by Mitsubishi Corp.
“In building this supply chain, the companies utilized existing facilities and applied the mass balance approach,” the statement read, noting that renewable feedstock will be mixed with fossil-based feedstock in existing production systems.
Renée Sharp, a director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an nonprofit environmental advocacy group, called the mass balance approach “problematic” in 2024, since the label “circular mass balanced recycled content” could mislead consumers into thinking the product is fully recycled or recyclable. In reality, she said there is no way for consumers to know how much recycled content is in a garment labeled as such.
Others see the process as a way to introduce renewable materials into the manufacturing process without the costs of having to dedicate a separate production line; a tradeoff to normalize renewable materials, which are otherwise expensive to process on their own.
It sends a “signal,” as Fashion for Good, a global innovation platform, put it, “that demand for materials composed of renewable or recycled feedstock is real.”