Published: Sunday, August 23, 2009
Nashua man starting business that produces biking shirts from recycled plastic bottles
By ANDREW WOLFE, Staff Writer
awolfe@nashuatelegraph.com
NASHUA – A shirt made from soda bottles might sound more clunky than comfortable, a buoyant gimmick at best.
Shirts made from fiber spun from recycled bottles, however, can be comfortable, stylish and made entirely within the United States, a Nashua entrepreneur has found.
Six months after Jonathan Wayne and a friend lit upon the idea for a green-wear mountain bike apparel company, Wayne recently placed his first order for roughly 170 blue shirts, made entirely in the U.S. from recycled plastic bottles.
Wayne hopes the first batch will sell out fast, and he expects to place a second order soon and to expand the line. He said more colors and women's sizes will be the first priority for his firm, Dirt Republic. The shirts will be sold through the company Web site (www.dirtrepublic.com), and perhaps also local cycle shops, Wayne said.
Industry analysts estimate that some 10.2 million people in the United States enjoy mountain biking at least occasionally, and Wayne figures that Dirt Republic will do well if it can sell shirts to just a small percentage of them.
Each shirt requires about 10 bottles' worth of fiber, so if he can sell 100,000 shirts, Wayne said, “That's a million bottles that aren't going into a landfill.”
Alas, Americans toss some 60 million plastic bottles every day, most of them into landfills, according to waste industry estimates. That's a lot of shirts, Wayne notes.
“At the end of the day, you're only going to make a difference if you get to some scale, but you've got to start somewhere,” Wayne said. “My task is to make it sustainable.
“It's in its infancy stage, I'm not naive enough to realize that it's not. I'm small fry. I'm tiny.” Still, he added, “It would be cool to wake up one day and be the Pearl Izumi or the Nike of recycled sportswear.”
“I see no major obstacles on the way,” he said. “I know we can build the shirts.”
In addition to saving landfill space, using recycled fibers saves oil and electricity, both of which are needed in abundance to make synthetics made from scratch, Wayne says. Keeping the manufacturing process in the United States also will help reduce the company's carbon “tire tracks,” Wayne says, as well as preserve manufacturing jobs and make it easier for Wayne to keep in touch with his suppliers and manufacturers.
Dirt Republic will use Repreve fibers, a brand of Unifi, of Greensboro, N.C. Wayne says he's been told that every pound of recycled fiber saves half a gallon of gasoline just in the manufacturing process.
Wayne figures his shirts will sell for around $40, a little more for long-sleeved shirts. The first batch will be blue, with the Dirt Rebuplic logo, and available only in men's sizes. Wayne hopes to expand into road cycling and other niche sports markets in time, he said.
Wayne has arranged for a California company to turn the Repreve fibers in fabric and then ship it back to North Carolina to be stitched into shirts. He's still looking into tightening that loop to further improve the product's energy efficiency, he said.
He could have the shirts made cheaper in China, but not better, Wayne said, and it was tough finding companies willing to work with the smaller orders of a small, startup business. Still, keeping the process in the United States was important to him, he said.
“Part of it, yes, there's an angle there . . . but it actually feels quite good,” Wayne said. “Everything needs to be, in my mind, environmentally friendly. I don't think we want to do it halfway.”
Wayne's concern for U.S. manufacturing is perhaps surprising, considering he's a dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, having been born and raised in northern England.
Wayne has worked in sales for a multinational computer company (he asked that it not be named) since he was still a student in England, and he said he has no plans to leave his job. He fell in love with both mountain biking and his wife, Heather, after a transfer to Colorado.
The couple had lived in Colorado about eight years when they decided it was time for a change, he said. They chose southern New Hampshire, he said, after literally closing their eyes and setting a finger to a map. They have since settled in Nashua, where they're raising two young girls.
Dirt Republic began as an idea Wayne spun out while riding and over beers with a friend, Tim Seitz, who worked at the time for Anheuser-Busch and has since moved to another brewery in Colorado, Wayne said. Wayne summarized Dirt Republic's origins on the company Web site:
“What do you get when you cross mountain bikers, environmental engineers and a night on the town? Yes you guessed it, the Dirt Republic Eco Bike Wear. It never fails to amaze me the ideas you can come up with after a few beers. With a passion for riding and for keeping the trails clean we wanted to go to the next step and help mountain biking go green.”
Wayne has indulged his passion more exotically than most riders, however. Before their daughters were born, Wayne said, his wife drove “this big old bus full of our smelly bike gear” while he and some friends rode a Trans Alps race in Europe, and last year, he and a team of friends competed in the Cape Epic, an eight-day race across South Africa. They wound up unable to finish after local thorn brushes chewed through their supply of tire tubes.
“There was one guy who got like nine flats in one day,” Wayne recalled.
“The next one I'd really like to do is the Trans Rockies,” Wayne said, and he fancies a race in Wales. However, “The last one cost me a lot of money, a lot of favors with the missus.”
With a full-time job, a fledgling business and family, Wayne has had to cut back his trail time a tad, but his favorite local spots include the “FOMBA” trails near Lake Massebesic, Bear Brook State Park and the Yudicky and Horse Hill areas in Nashua and Merrimack, he said.
“I just love mountain biking,” Wayne said. “If I had a day a week to ride, I'd be on my mountain bike.”
Andrew Wolfe can be reached at 594-6410 or awolfe@nashuatelegraph.com.
