Le Crab and Za Vhale: November 2010

Monday, November 22, 2010

I-Tals doin it the only way they know how.

A six-week initiative promoted by the Italian lingerie brand Intimissimi essentially exchanges one form of padding for another: used bras collected at its brand name stores throughout Italy will be recycled into insulated and soundproof panels used for construction.

To raise awareness of the “pressing problems that afflict the ecosystem,” Intimissimi is accepting the bras through the end of this month. A multimedia ad campaign featuring the Russian model Irina Shayk urges women to bring used bras to an Intimissimi store to “help save the planet.”

“Doing good for the environment is also a matter of style,” she advises consumers.

For every used bra brought in, a customer receives three euros ($4) toward the purchase of a new bra, an offer more commonly associated here with used cars, refrigerators or air conditioners. “Well, why not bras?” said the orchestrator of the project, Sandro Veronesi, president of the Italian lingerie company Calzedonia Group, which owns Intimissimi.

“There are programs for the scrapping of appliances, but no one thinks about what’s involved in the waste management of brassieres,” he said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Veronesi said that bras pose their own particular recycling challenges because they’re made of several different materials. Enter Ovat Campagnari, a Veneto-based company that specializes in the disposal and re-engineering of apparel waste.

The bra fibers are mixed with other textiles to make the soundproof insulating panels. Mirco Campagnari, one of the company’s owners, said he hoped the campaign would generate a greater awareness of the environmental benefits of using recycled materials in construction. “Many companies have been contacting us since the campaign started,” he said.

So far, Ovat’s effort constitutes an experiment. To expand and continue the initiative will require weighing the costs and logistics once all of the bras and related numbers are in.

Initial results have been positive, Mr. Campagnari said. Since the program started on Oct. 18, 30 to 40 percent percent of all bras sold in Intimissimi stores have involved the trade-in bonus.

Intimissimi is not the only ecofriendly lingerie maker on the market. In recent years, Triumph International Japan has designed several brassieres to raise environmental awareness, including one that comes with reusable chopsticks (for markets in Asia, where millions of wooden chopsticks are chucked each year); a bra sold with fold-up reusable bags made from recycled polyester fiber inside the cups; and a bra made from recycled bottles. None of these models were created for mass consumption.

Mr. Veronesi said his company was looking into environmental sustainable materials for manufacturing bras but that the effort was still in the embryonic stage. “For now a synthetic component is necessary for support, but this is a sector that we look to develop,” he said.