SGB Executive Q&A: Gore Fabrics Sustainability Leader Bernhard Kiehl

By Eric Smith

Sustainability is a journey for W.L. Gore & Associates, and Bernhard Kiehl is helping guide the company along the path of creating products that achieve optimal athletic performance with minimal environmental impact.

Kiehl, the sustainability leader for Gore Fabrics, sat down with SGB at Outdoor Retailer Summer Market in Denver, CO, last month to talk about the company’s ambitious environmental and chemical management goals unveiled in early 2017, including the milestones achieved and the targets still on the horizon.

At the heart of these goals is Gore Fabrics’ intent to eliminate “PFCs of environmental concern” from Durable Water Repellent (DWR) treatments and membrane manufacturing processes by 2023 while continuously reducing the environmental footprint of Gore products throughout their full life cycle.

Gore already achieved the first milestone in this endeavor when the company presented DWR garments that didn’t contain PFCs of environmental concern at ISPO in Munich. The next target is bringing those products to retail by the end of 2018.

By the end of 2020, Gore Fabrics plans to eliminate PFCs of environmental concern from the company’s consumer laminate shipments. That corresponds to approximately 85 percent of product units in the market, including jackets, shoes, gloves and accessories.

And between 2021 and 2023 Gore Fabrics will remove PFCs of environmental concern from the remaining consumer fabrics laminate shipments while continuing to deliver products that meet the performance specifications relevant for the end use.

Although Kiehl understands customers might not want to take a deep dive into the chemistry behind these goals, he also knows they expect their favorite brands to deliver products that are made with sustainable materials and processes, yet can perform in the foulest of conditions. That is Gore’s ultimate mission.

“We believe we can, together with our suppliers, develop those new materials that maintain performance, but do not come with the same environmental concern,” Kiehl said. “And we are now on a good path to deliver.”

Here is the rest of what Kiehl shared with SGB about where Gore has been on its sustainability journey and where the company is heading.

Why is sustainability so important for Gore? We are part of an industry that plays in the outdoors, and we don’t want to make products that come with an undue burden for the environment. We started our program more than 20 years ago with our Life Cycle Assessment, understanding what the impact of our product is, and since then we’ve tried to improve and reduce.

Does Gore want to be seen as the industry leader in sustainability, and in what ways do you feel like the company has accomplished that in the outdoor space? With our focus on innovation in materials, that’s where we can bring a unique position to sustainability—trying to deliver the best combination of high functionality and low environmental footprint. And due to our material expertise, I think that’s a role we can play. But we see sustainability as a team sport. We partner with our value chain partners, customers and suppliers because we believe that we are stronger together than we are alone.

How do you ensure your value chain partners are keeping pace with Gore’s sustainability goals? We work long term with our brand partners to serve our consumers together. We share the same values. That’s probably the most effective way of allowing us to align. Some of our customers and brand partners are clearly leaders, and everyone has specific strengths that they bring. I don’t think it’s necessarily us pushing others, but it’s a collaboration. We’ve done that for many years in a more formal way within the Outdoor Industry Association Sustainability Working Group [of which Kiehl is a member].

Is the industry doing enough to encourage one another to become more sustainable? We are developing—together within our industry association but also within the Sustainable Apparel Coalition—ways of creating more transparency about sustainability and performance of products. We believe that will create a race to the top. Nobody wants to have a bad ranking. These tools are being developed, and are not yet consumer facing because we’re still revising. It all needs to be very trusted data, but eventually I think it will help us all push each other.

The word “sustainability” can be overused, and consumers might feel like they’re being greenwashed, so is transparency critical as sustainability grows in importance? Absolutely. We believe any environmental claims should be based on good data and should be substantiated. I sense a lot of common ground that nobody wants to confuse consumers with wrong or unsubstantiated messages, so there’s a little bit of watching each other and developing these tools together. This will help us to be more clear at the end with the consumer and have all the substantiation whenever we get challenged.

What are the next milestones for Gore? The first milestone, the big milestone for us, was offering this new DWR, which is free of PFCs of environmental concern. That’s happening now. Our next step will be also offering moisture barriers membranes, which are free of PFCs of environmental concern from a life cycle perspective, meaning from how the raw materials are made to the final disposal; these materials will not be associated with PFCs of environmental concern. And that milestone is planned for 2020. Our shipment date is 2020, so these materials would likely reach the retailers in 2021. Then we have more sophisticated technologies for more demanding end uses where we’ll need a little longer to develop these new materials and that takes us to 2023.

Do you take pride in meeting these milestones and being an industry leader in sustainability along the way? Absolutely. We know materials deeply. We are innovative. And we feel this is a field where we can play to our strengths and make a difference. We develop materials which are better than what others can deliver, and being on that path and seeing it move forward is absolutely exciting.

Is there anything else about the Gore sustainability journey that you’d like to share? I think it’s important to keep in mind that the biggest single aspect of what makes a product be more or less environmentally friendly is how long it’s being used. Whenever we improve chemistries or introduce recycled content or introduce new dying technologies, we need to make sure that we aren’t compromising on the durability of these products, because at the end we wouldn’t win for the environment. We keep that always in mind. That’s kind of an overarching theme we need to be mindful of. The Gore-Tex brand stands for reliability, for a consumer’s trust in the brand. I think it’s a combination of trusting the brand and seeing the innovation which happens on a continual basis. We do not want to make products that wouldn’t support the trust that consumers put in our products.

Photo courtesy Gore

[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://s.gravatar.com/avatar/dec6c8d990a5a173d9ae43e334e44145?s=80[/author_image] [author_info]Eric Smith is Senior Business Editor at SGB Media. Reach him at eric@sgbonline.com or 303-578-7008. Follow on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.[/author_info] [/author]