Navas Lab's believes in bamboo clothing. We think it is one of the most revolutionary fabrics to come along since spandex (which we are also fans of!). Read below for why it's so awesome.
Bamboo has long been an amazingly versatile material that can be manipulated into a variety of purposes from food to building materials to clothing to medicine. For hundreds of years people have been transforming the bamboo plant into textiles. Year after year more and more people learn about all the benefits available from bamboo, and in particular many are learning that bamboo is pretty awesome for clothing. If you’re not that familiar with bamboo clothing yet, keep reading to learn more about it.
Bamboo grows incredibly quickly, allowing for a higher output than other textiles. The resulting material is breathable and easy to wear. It also has an amazing power of being thermoregulating - meaning that if you are warm the material cools, if you are cool it warms.
At Navas Lab we blend bamboo fibers with a little spandex or lycra to give it a little stretch. The bamboo parts of our clothes are also biodegradable.
To break down our process even further, technically our clothes are made from rayon from bamboo.
Rayon is a semi-synthetic fiber made by chemically reshaping cellulose. The inner pith from the bamboo plant’s trunk is extracted with a steaming process and then finely crushed to extract the cellulose. The cellulose goes through a purification treatment as well as a lye treatment, dissolved in carbon disulfide, and finally re-formed to make rayon. In other words the bamboo plant is ground up and reshaped into fibers that can be milled into cloth.
Much of the rayon from bamboo in the world is processed in places with varying levels of environmental regulations, places where factories and operations can more easily skirt local laws to get rid of their chemical waste, sometimes with harmful side effects. There is currently no Canadian-origin bamboo rayon however, meaning we must still source our raw materials from places where we have little control over how they utilize their waste - particularly the lye and carbon disulfide used in the processing.
If you dig deep enough the production of every commodity has a social or environmental cost of some kind. As a business we have to remain in business to be able to affect change. For now that means making great products that people love to wear and making them to the highest level of quality possible so that people will buy better less often and be inclined to repair rather than throw away. We use the highest quality bamboo material which is milled in Canada, from foreign bamboo rayon. The milling and dyeing processes meet the Oeko-Tex 100 Standard, which is widely regarded as the standard for proper use and disposal of textile processing chemicals.
For Navas the quest for the best textile never ends. We have to provide you with the best possible outfit and make sure that there is not guilt in how it was made. We continue to build better partnerships and look for the best manufacturers to ensure that what you wear makes you feel good in body and soul. When you wear Navas rest assured that you are on the forefront of bamboo manufacturing and looking the best you can.