Icebreaker Aims to Go Plastic-Free by 2023

Last year, Auckland-based outdoor brand Icebreaker sponsored French ultra-swimmer Ben Lecomte to swim across the Pacific from Hawaii to San Francisco through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. He swam 350 nautical miles over the summer. The goal was simple: swim and collect plastic samples, Esha Chhabra writes for Forbes. Chhabra speaks with Icebreaker’s director of global product design, Alistair Smith, to learn about the process of stripping back the synthetics from their collection

Working with a support crew of scientists, Lecomte was able to shed further light on a growing problem: plastics everywhere in our system. Through the entire stretch of his swim from Hawaii to the California Coast, he and the crew collected over 45,000 microplastics.

This is why Icebreaker, famous for their wool-based collections, is making a commitment to go completely plastic-free by 2023. Can they do it?

“Knowing we’d be building some solutions from the ground up, we set 2023 as an optimistic target. We’re working from chemistry, to yarn, to fabric, to product, which takes time to do properly, but is the right approach,” Smith tells Forbes.

Original article by Esha Chhabra, Forbes, October 28, 2020.