Totum is fully devoted to structuring itself in a way to be truly sustainable and to give back from the start. Joining One Percent for the Planet is just the beginning of the journey, a show of commitment. The next step would be working out a system for measuring the lifetime impact of products. For example, based on the Higg Index, polyester can have a really good score if it’s recycled, even though it might wear out and become worthless very quickly. Silk, on the other hand, is durable, you can keep wearing it for ages, yet it doesn’t have a good rating based on the same index system. Totum would like to initiate a conversation with the community about the materials and choices that are being made daily. With the unsettling amount of greenwashing these days, it’s important to navigate your way through all of the schemes that recreate materials only to make them look sustainable. Still, the deeper you go, you find out they’re actually not. Justifying the excessive production of plastic is by no means an option here.
“We as a company have decided to go with just pure natural materials. For us, recycling plastics is not a solution, so we’ve kind of decided not to be using these recycled polyesters, which are trending right now. Taking a plastic bottle and making it into yarn is actually not very healthy whatsoever. And in that specific case, to be able to make recycled yarns out of plastic bottles, you need to have certain conditions for plastic bottles. What often happens is that the recycling of bottles themselves are not always in perfect conditions, they’re not always bottled water, so they end up producing the plastic bottles just to reuse it, just to make the yarns.”
Hemp yarn has shown to be a great option because even though it’s not certified organic, it grows organically naturally. You don’t need pesticides to grow it, it’s a very thriving material that doesn’t need much water. It’s a plant that was very popular before World War 2 that sort of disappeared, and it’s making a comeback, even though it’s still quite hard to get. Ria and Alex believe in hemp and its many applications and will continue investing in it in hopes of it becoming more of a staple in the fashion industry in general, also to be able to restore good balance in the pricing.
Currently, Totum is working on further textile and colour developments, experimenting with bedsheets that are made of a blend of hemp and cotton, which is quite an unusual combination in the world of bedding at the moment.