Even the best outdoor gear wears out eventually – no matter how much we will it not to.
It’s a harsh reality, but when it’s time to say goodbye to badly worn out clothing and kit, we normally send it to landfill, where it can remain for hundreds of years, often never fully breaking down.
But one Cumbrian business is working hard to turn the tide on the outcomes of old outdoor gear.
Dirtbags Climbing, based in Kendal, takes textiles and plastic waste generated by the outdoor industry destined for landfill and transforms it into new products.
Owned by Jennifer Dickinson, 34, who lives in the town, her inspiration to set up the business first came in 2017, while she was on maternity leave.
She said: “I’m a climber and my family are climbers so we have a lot of rope lying around because when you regularly use it, it becomes no longer safe after a few years.
“But the rope is so colourful and beautiful and if you speak to any climber, they all find it hard to throw it away. But the more people I spoke to the more I realised how many old ropes were just sitting in people’s garages.
“So I decided to start making chalk bags out of old climbing rope in the corner of my bedroom. Being on maternity leave at the time had given me a little time away from work to think about a new venture.
“I could hand sew and knit and draw and design, but I couldn’t use a sewing machine to start with.
“My husband James actually found our first sewing machine in a skip near where he worked and he fixed it and showed me how to use it and it all went from there.”
Jennifer began to branch out and asked outdoor clothing retailers around Kendal what they were doing with their old or leftover materials.
She said: “Kendal is a hub for outdoor clothing retailers so I started asking around about what people were throwing away and what they do with end of roll fabrics and it turned out that there’s not a lot of people out there using it or upcycling.
“It was all going in bin and I wanted to save it and make use of it because it was still useful fabric, so I decided there was a gap in the market for us at that point.
“We officially became a company in 2019 and we’ve done it alone without any investment. It’s been really gradual but we’ve kept on top of it and I’ve taught myself to run a business along the way.
“I think I always knew I would work for myself eventually, but I just didn’t know how I would do that. It was only after I did lots of different jobs and as an adult and mother and someone spending a lot of time outdoors that the idea for Dirtbags bubbled up.”
Dirtbags Climbing has since grown to create a range of sports bags and accessories from all kinds of materials and has worked with big brands like Berghaus.
Jennifer’s products are sold online and in climbing walls and shops locally and further afield.
She said: “We work with all kinds of outdoor materials and textiles which includes things like tents, climbing ropes, old jackets, rucksacks and wetsuits – basically anything that’s reached the end of its life and is destined for landfill.
“To do this we contact companies who for instance have off cuts or end of life products and we also take consumer products too, so the general public can drop things off for us and we upcycle them.
“We then take all those textiles and break them down into the different components and we take all the useable bits of fabric and stitch them together to create new products.
“Berghaus actually reached out to us in 2020 to say they had materials and had heard we were upcycling them and they sent us a few boxes and we made some lovely washbags out of what they sent.
“They still send things to be recycled like every so often like end of life products or samples.”
In 2023, Jennifer and her team upcycled 870kg of textiles set for landfill – the equivalent of 87 thousand plastic bottles and more than double what the team upcycled in 2022.
She added: “Naturally people who spend time in the outdoors and are immersed in nature want to look after it and I think that’s the same for the people who buy our products.
“I think it’s important we address textile waste purely because of the type of material outdoor clothing is made of. While outdoor retailers are bringing back natural fibres, a lot of modern materials that keep us warm and dry are plastic and made from oils.
“They will never biodegrade because of that and while they’re all really useful materials that keeps us dry, warm and safe, we also need to turn our eye to what happens when it’s no longer useful as a product.
“When I first started doing it nothing was being done. It was more a focus on making products last a long time and repairing them, but there will always be an end of life and I want us to be the people who deal with it.”
Unlike larger outdoor companies – Jennifer said the team designs based on the old materials coming in and not on a product idea.
She said: “It’s a collaborative process, my husband James was really involved to begin with and helped design a lot of products but now I ask my team and we do it together.
“Usually companies will say right, we’re going to make a jacket and it needs to have this pocket and this feature and be in this colour and someone will design it, but for us it’s the total opposite.
“For example, someone might drop a tent off and it has a huge gash down the side and only a certain amount of fabric we can use and it might be a specific colour, so from there we will look at it and say right, what can we make from it.
“We’ve just made a batch of heavy duty tote bags made from old inflatable mattresses – which makes for a great heavy duty bag.
“It’s great because as a small business we can make pretty much anything from any material.”
Last year, the team appeared in From Then Till Now, a FedEx documentary series highlighting small business owners who build businesses from scratch.
Jennifer also recently moved the business into a bigger unit in Kendal’s Lake District Business Park
She added: “All our work is done on site and we have accountability with our products – so everything we work with comes from the UK, is made in the UK and we only send it out to the UK to keep it all as eco-friendly as possible.
“I currently have a team of three women who are all local. When I set up the business I said I wanted it to be very thoughtful about the people working here and their work-life balance.
“So we’re not a normal work place with normal opening hours, if someone wants to be off for childcare they can make up the hours later in the week. I want it to be a nice, flexible atmosphere.
“We’ve done quite a lot of growth in the last year, but my main aims are to keep taking as much material out of landfill as we can and aid the outdoor industry into becoming more eco-conscious and mindful of what actually happens to this material.”