We created these products with one goal:
To keep them out of the landfill.
Each item in the Endless Promise collection is painstakingly engineered for total recyclability.
That way, once this gear has accompanied you on its lifetime of adventures, it can easily become something new.
This is just one step in our effort to take full responsibility for what we make, from beginning to end.
Because with Endless Promise, there doesn’t have to be an end.
Recyclability Is the Toughest Piece of the Puzzle
Unfortunately, you can’t just toss old sleeping bags or backpacks into the recycling bin alongwith your empty cans and bottles.
We knew the key to making a successful recyclable product was making an easily recyclableproduct, and that meant a mono-polymer approach was needed.
Mono-polymer design means creating a product that’s nearly entirely made from a singlematerial family. (Currently, the easiest consumer goods material to recycle is polyester, sothat’s where we set our sights.)
While basic outdoor gear might typically use anywhere from a half -dozen to a dozen differentmaterials, we have to simplify our Endless Promise designs down to just a few.
The development of ForteTM, a sleeping bag, was hard. The development of two very technicalbackpacks, in comparison, was like going from a 5.11 indoor climbing route to free soloing ElCap.
But like all design challenges in NEMO history, our team responded with innovative solutions.These solutions not only met the sustainability standards, but they also surpassed our sky-high performance ones. In developing our Endless Promise R packs, we’ve introduced twonew materials that make these products better on the trail and better for the user. We alsointegrated repairability into the patterning of the packs themselves, so they can stay on thetrail longer.
Even with products that were technically recyclable, however, our work wasn’t done. We hadto ensure there was a place to send our products when they had reached the end of theiradventures – a place that could process and ultimately break down the gear into new, usablematerial.
For Forte, we found the right partner with Unifi. a U.S.-based recycler that was excited toaccept this challenge. Unifi is known for their REPREVER yarns, which are created fromrecycled plastic and used in everything from shoes to tent pole bags. For our down bags.Allied Feather + Down in Los Angeles can extract the down from the bags and then send theremaining material to Ambercycle, an advanced chemical recycler also in Los Angeles thatcan break things down to a molecular level for a stronger, infinitely recyclable new material.
Through these partnerships, and the support of Endless Promise R customers, we hope toone day produce new products made from our old ones.
