Ethical Fashion

Rapanui is an Eco-Fashion company from the Isle of Wight, that makes Organic, Ethical clothing using Renewable Energy with award-winning traceability. Rapanui is about making eco-fashion cool.

Rapanui Eco Latest

Ethical Fashion

Fairtrade

Environental Policy Statement

The Trouble with cotton

Waste Management

Design to use less: Waste management at Rapanui starts at the design stage: we design our products to be simpler and easier to dispose of.

Waste management

Waste management at Rapanui starts at the design stage: we design our products to be simpler and easier to dispose of. Our choice to use only natural and organic fabrics means that the fabrics are 100% biodegradable. You could throw them on your compost heap later on.
We also use a screen printing process with inks that create less waste, need less water to dispose of and less energy to set, as well as being 100% phthalate free.

Example waste streams.

Organic Cotton makes up the majority of our fabric usage. Only 20% of the original cotton crop biomass is used in the final product, therefore it is very important to find uses for what is considered waste.

At the cotton ginning plant, where the cotton balls are taken to separate the fibres from the seeds, some of the waste ingredients are used as cattle feed and cotton seed oil.

This is possible with Organic Cotton as conventional cotton, which is chemically intensive, could harm the cattle’s health. So there is a herd of cattle in Northern India living on an Organic diet, which you support, when you shop at Rapanui. During the spinning process. The shorter cotton fibres are separated and used to make lower quality textiles. All leftovers from the cutting/dyeing stage are used for rope or second quality clothes production. Waste T-shirts can be sent back to Rapanui and donated to our local Morsbag scheme which recycles fabrics into reusable shopping bags.

Packaging

Rapanui apparel is packaged in biodegradable PVC-free packaging. It’s also waterproof, which means we don’t need to use two layers – a bag and a water barrier. Our packaging system, though it may not look it, is in our opinion the most robust and eco-friendly packaging design available.

Waste Management Pyramid

Transport

Rapanui has a ‘No Airfreight’ policy. We do not transport our goods by air (unless we have no other option) , and we use containerised ocean shipping. Therefore the carbon footprint generated by transporting our apparel to Europe is negligible.

As a result, we’ve reduced our carbon emissions by 80% overall at a product level.

Research

Our waste reduction strategy comes more from an inherent sense of what is ‘right’ rather than a numeric objective. Therefore our optimisation of our supply chain is a constantly evolving project. Whilst the strategies above show that we have made some solid reductions to waste, we are also conducting more R&D into cradle-to-cradle sustainability and the suitability of never-ending 100% recyclable resources as an alternative to our current product