Sustainability

What we actually do, what we claim, and what we will not claim. Including the parts where polyester does not win.

A Canvas Is Not A Shirt

Almost every environmental comparison between polyester and cotton was written about clothing. A shirt is washed fifty times and thrown away. A painting support is made once and expected to outlive the person who painted on it.

Change the object and some of the answers invert. Polyester wins on water, land and agrochemicals. It loses on carbon per kilogram of fabric and on biodegradability. For a garment, not biodegrading is a fault. For the thing holding up a painting, breaking down is the failure mode.

Read the full breakdown, with sources

Green Manufacturing

Textile manufacturing is water and energy intensive, and Sub-Saharan Africa is increasingly water constrained. These programmes run in the plant where our canvas is made.
30 to 40% process water reused
Waste heat recovered, not vented
Offcuts recycled back into fibre
Remnants into bags, rugs, bedding
Chlorinated compounds and APEOs removed
Recycled polyester from bottles
Shop the range

What That Means In Practice

Water. A reticulation system reuses approximately 30 to 40 per cent of process water, reducing both consumption and the volume of effluent produced.

Energy. Manufacturing generates significant heat. Rather than releasing it into the atmosphere, a heat exchange system recovers it and transfers it into water used in production, heating water up to 60 degrees C.

Waste. Polyester offcuts are recycled back into fibre for non-woven applications rather than landfilled. Other remnants become school bags, woven rugs and bedding for community use, and local vendors repurpose more into handmade products.

Chemistry. Chlorinated raw materials have been removed from coatings. APEOs have been eliminated in favour of safer surfactants. Older fluorocarbon technologies have been replaced, with fluoro-free solutions introduced where possible.

Feedstock. Selected ranges use recycled polyester derived from post-consumer plastics including bottles, processed into fibre, spun into yarn, then woven into textiles meeting the same performance standards as virgin material.

Sustainability is an ongoing job rather than a finished one.

Being Precise About Recyclable

Our canvas is made from 100% recyclable PET. That is a statement about the fabric, and it is accurate.

We will not tell you a finished canvas goes in your kerbside bin. It is a coated fabric stapled to a frame, and separating those is not something a household recycling stream is set up to do.

What we can say is that the material is a recyclable polymer rather than a blend, and that production offcuts are recycled rather than landfilled.

We would rather show our working than round the numbers in our favour.

The Most Sustainable Canvas Is The One That Never Needs Replacing

Longevity is the sustainability story for a painting support.

A surface that holds tension for decades, does not rot, does not go brittle, and does not need restretching or relining is a surface that does not get remade, reshipped or thrown away.

That is where the real saving sits. It also happens to be the same thing that makes it good to paint on.

Canvases we stretched in our own factory in 2013 are still tight today.

Three Things Worth Knowing

  • No farmland, no pesticides

    The World Resources Institute reports that cotton farming accounts for 24 per cent of insecticides and 11 per cent of pesticides, on about 3 per cent of the world's arable land. Polyester needs none of it.

  • No laundering, no microfibres

    Synthetic microfibre release comes from washing garments. Nobody washes a stretched canvas, so the mechanism never happens.

  • Recycled option

    Our Eco Canvas is made from 100% post-consumer recycled polyester, which removes virgin fossil feedstock from the equation. Currently South Africa only.

    View Eco Canvas