Santini commit to environment with new eco-friendly fabrics

Italian cycle wear company Santini has introduced several new initiatives to reduce its environmental impact.

In its ongoing commitment to sustainability, the brand has teamed up with TIPA, which manufactures biodegradable plastic packaging, to ensure the packaging for its technical cycle wear is compostable and thus more environmentally friendly. Additionally, it has made advances in its fabric technology, creating the Trek- segafredo team clothing, World Championship rainbow jerseys and more, all from recycled and recovered materials.

As well as the clothing used by Santini’s World Tour partners, Santini has designed an eco-friendly jersey option for both men and women for its 2021 summer collection.

Eco Sleek Dinamo jersey for men

Santini’s Eco Sleek Dinamo jersey is made from 100% recycled fabrics. It contains RECY by Corno Eco fabric, which is a fabric made from a combination of used and discarded materials.

The jersey also contains Sitip’s Native Ecoknit, made from recycled fibres and yarns without polluting chemicals to reduce natural resource consumption and dependency on non-renewable energy sources.

The Eco Sleek Dinamo jersey has a body-hugging, aerodynamic fit and features a striped design in a choice of four colours: black, navy blue, khaki, and silver grey.

Eco Sleek Raggio jersey for women

Santini’s Eco Sleek Raggio jersey for women features the same fabrics as SLEEK DINAMO, but with a tailored, high-performance fit, designed for female riders.

RAGGIO features an optical striped motif and is available in silver grey with blue/green detailing, black with grey/strawberry details, navy blue with orange details, and purple/burgundy with pink detailing.

Producing practical, high-performance cycling apparel from eco-friendly fabrics has been a decade-long journey for Santini.

Fergus Niland, Lead Designer at Santini said: “We first started using recycled, polyester-based, jersey weight fabrics nearly ten years ago. The biggest obstacle back then was that there was so little choice.”

“it was something that we firmly believed, so we consistently chased our suppliers to create a broader range of eco-materials.”

Santini’s aim was to ensure that the recycled fabrics work just as well as new fabrics. Maintaining a tight supply chain was also a priority. “85% of our suppliers are based within 100 km of our factory. It’s pointless to fly recycled yarns thousands of miles to a fabric manufacturer, only to fly that fabric thousands of miles back to an apparel manufacturer. We wanted not only to impact the performance of the materials to meet our rider’s needs, but we wanted to impact the sourcing of even the raw materials to limit our eco-footprint,” Nilan added.

Improvements in performance fabrics made from recycled and recovered material have accelerated in the last few years, so Santini worked with long-time fabric partners and World Tour riders to test the materials. “The experiment worked,” Niland says. “We had happy pro riders and happy commercial sponsors. It was a win, win.”

Last year saw the Bergamo based brand turn it’s manufacturing attention to the production of surgical masks to assist those fighting the spread of Coronavirus.