Traceable recycled down partnership established

Allied Feather + Down, the company that co-created the Responsible Down Standard (RDS) and TrackMyDown traceability, added the tracking of recycled down in late 2022, called RENU:TRACE. The first partner in this space is NEMO Equipment Inc., which designed its Endless Promise^® sleeping bags to make them fully recyclable. This includes having a take-back program and recycling plan. When these bags reach their end of life one day, the company will return the down to Allied for cleaning, sorting and repackaging. The outer shell’s polyester will go to Ambercycle, which aims to set up a plant producing cycora^® recycled polyester at commercial levels in 2025.

The RENU:TRACE program fulfills Allied’s desire to enable brands to show that the recycled down in their products was sourced from ethically treated animals and create a closed-loop system.

“With current recycled down mostly collected from bedding products via large industrial recycling facilities, there is no way to know exactly where that down came from,” says Matthew Betcher, creative and marketing director for Allied.

All of Allied’s partners can make use of the program because of the already established provenance of its materials. Allied’s processing facilities in Montebello, Calif., and Hangzhou, China, will have the collection and separation systems installed.