Pangaia Sets New Standards in Material Usage and Social Responsibility
Pangaia’s 2023 Impact Report outlines the progress the material sciences company made and the wins celebrated as well as the challenges faced and mistakes made along the way, exploring the brand’s production innovation, material usage, decarbonization and social responsibility efforts over the past year.
“[The report] tells the story of what Pangaia is aiming to do through commercializing responsible innovation to accelerate an Earth positive future,” Rory Hugill, Pangaia’s senior innovation portfolio manager and project manager of the report, told Sourcing Journal. “This is incredibly important for a brand that is best known for its material innovation…We recognize that, as a fashion brand, we have to operate responsibly.”
More from Sourcing Journal
The first section of the 80-page report highlights the four innovative products Pangaia launched in 2023, including the Renu Jacket powered by Ervnu, which is the first denim jacket made from 100 percent textile waste that can be fully recycled at the end of its useful life. There’s also the 3D-printed Absolute Sneaker, created in collaboration with Zellerfeld, that’s 100 percent recyclable and the Air Gilet garment, which combines Natural Fiber Welding’s biobased and plastic-free Mirum material with Pangaia’s patented Flwrfll technology made from wildflowers.
Moving on from the material innovation launches, the report looks at the brand’s material portfolio as a whole. The B Corp said it reinforced its commitment to increase the share of biocompatible materials year over year, making the “conscious decision” to report on products purchased instead of products sold to improve its footprint accuracy.
“We’re continually measuring all the materials we’re using our products against a framework that we have created—our preferred materials list (PML)—which is a ranking system across all materials that exist in the world,” Hugill explained.
The PML assesses materials within standard textile classifications across five rankings, from “best in class” to “not recommended for use at Pangaia.” These categories are champions, runner-ups, middle of the pack, laggards and dropouts. “Middle of the pack” (biosynthetic, manmade cellulosic, manmade synthetic polymer and natural cellulosic) accounted for 91 percent of materials used, the report found, while “champion” (natural protein) accounted for 0.7 percent and “runner ups” (biosynthetic, natural cellulosic and natural protein) took home 7 percent.
“When we talk about our preferred materials list, we’re holding ourselves to really quite high standards,” Hugill said, noting that very common-use materials like polyester and nylon are considered “dropouts.”
“When we talk about runner ups and champions, we’re really talking about materials that, in all honesty, you can only source a very small amount of because there’s just not very much supply for them at the moment,” he continued. “It would be virtually impossible for us to get 100 percent runner ups and champion [materials]; what we’re instead looking to do is move further toward that, but also at the same time, what we constitute champion and runner ups will also increase as the number of material innovations entering the market increases.”
Cotton—including organic, recycled and regenerative—remained the highest percentage of materials purchased despite Pangaia’s exploration of alternative blends like C-Fiber, Palf and bast fibers, the report reads. But the brand achieved a 100 percent Seacell Lyocell quality, increasing the percentage of the fiber used in previous collections by 80 percent.
“The best example is organic cotton—I think it accounts for less than one percent of all cotton used in the industry, right? So from an industry perspective, you would consider that as a good runner up or maybe even champion, but for us, we call that a middle of the pack material because we’re trying to hold ourselves accountable to new, different standards from the industry, just because of our ambition and our intention as a brand.”
Pangaia said life cycle assessments(LCAs) are important to validate the brand’s assumptions about the impact of its chosen materials. Last year, LCAs covered 84 percent of the products Pangaia produced for sale.
Naturally, after the materials used section, Pangaia’s impact report explores what happens to those materials at the end of their useful life—marking the first time the brand has included this type of information in a report.
“It’s a bit of a challenge from [the] brand perspective; once you’ve sold the product to the consumer, how much responsibility can you take for what happens to that product at the end of its life?” Hugill said. “You can create a take-back scheme, a resale program, you can do these things to encourage and extend the lifecycle of an item, which we have done, but we believe you want to be making sure that the products that you’re creating are compatible with existing recycling infrastructure.”
Thus, Pangaia does what it can: reduce the use of elastane and avoid blending, for example. Based on internal analysis, 85 percent of Pangaia’s products are recyclable at the end of their life. To push that number further, the brand is exploring the concept of biocompatibility and how textile waste can act as a bio-beneficial input to nature’s system.
But in order to take “full responsibility” for the biocompatibility of its products, Pangaia said it needs to build business systems that support a circular flow of resources and products.
Last year, the MoMA collaborator introduced its “interrelated approach” to circularity across the value chain and focused on “upstream” circularity. The biggest progress area for the brand in 2023, per the report, was the launch of Pangaia ReWear. That launch was the first of its kind, thanks to the Instant Resale integration with Eon—leveraging the power of Digital Product Passports to automate the listing process.
“I think this is really when digital product passports become really exciting is when you see then as, like, a home in which lots of different services come out of, rather than being a solution in and of themselves,” Hugill said. “We’re in a world in the future where someone can scan a QR code and they can see the impact of their item, how they should wash their item, where they could repair it, how they can resell it and then how they can dispose of it. That, to me, is where you have a lot of value.”
The next session focuses on Pangaia’s commitment to decarbonization. Last year, the brand continued measuring its carbon footprint, transitioning to renewable energy in direct operations and had its science based targets approved by the SBTi. Those targets include reaching next-zero across the entire value chain, reducing emissions from direct operations by 42 percent by 2030, halving value chain emissions by 2030 and achieving next-zero in direct operations by 2025.
In 2023, Pangaia reduced its carbon footprint by 40 percent from its 2021 baseline. But the caveat here, Hugill said, is that the brand used a spend-based model to calculate its carbon emissions, as most brands do, thus its emissions are also a result of spending and purchasing less.
“We’re really happy to have reduced our emissions but we also recognize that the big test will be how that then, in the next two to three years—we’re not a big brand with 50 years of history in terms of financial spending and CO2 emissions, we only have three, so the variation is much greater,” Hugill said. “So this is something we’re really happy about, but something we want to monitor very closely.”
Regarding the supply chain, Pangaia developed new standards to “root out and mitigate any inhumane practices or negative impacts in [its] supply chain.” The Timberland partner also formally joined the Fair Wear Foundation and received “outstanding results” for its first assessment, the nonprofit said. Pangaia also launched a new partnership with the traceability platform Retraced to help the Flrwdwn providers gain visibility of its supply chain.
“This was the input from us recognizing the importance of traceability for us to be able to establish a responsible business,” Hugill said of the partnership. “We’ll also be beginning actually tracing our products so that we can really discover as much of our supply chain as possible across different products.”
The penultimate chapter highlights the Pangaia employees as well as the company’s commitment to giving back to communities.
“Philanthropy has really been something that’s very important to us,” Hugill said. “Since its inception, we’ve always allocated a certain percentage of our revenues to philanthropy in different ways as well as having gone above and beyond in different areas.”
Pangaia identifies and works with organizations that are important to the company from an environmental perspective. This includes the Tomorrow Tree Fund and the Bee The Change Fund, both powered by Milkywire, an app that allows users to explore and donate to grassroots charities worldwide. But Pangaia also wants to support organizations independent of its own business operations, like supporting ocean conservation through Coral Gardeners and refugees and displaced people through Choose Love.
“When we meet an organization that’s completely independent and outside the formalized structures that we’ve got in place, we go out of our way to include them and take their message beyond our own business operations,” Maria Srivastava, Pangaia’s chief impact officer, said. “That’s something incredibly important to us.”