Performance fabric giant Polartec levels up its green practices with ‘Fresh Face,’ a peppermint-based odor-resistant treatment.
Polartec added another arrow to its sustainability quiver this week with the launch of a Bluesign-certified alternative to chemical and metal-based odor solutions. And get this — it’s an odorless peppermint oil-based treatment. The fresh treatment technology will make its debut in Polartec’s 2022 runs of Power Dry, Power Grid, and Delta performance fabrics.
Why turn a new leaf on current odor-resistant practices? There are a few good reasons.
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Fresh Peppermint Tech
Polartec began looking for longer-lasting and biodegradable odor treatment options as part of its years-long Eco-Engineering initiative. Polartec touts its peppermint oil odor-resist treatment as a renewable, sustainably harvested, and biodegradable solution.
Plus, peppermint oil possesses antimicrobial properties that effectively mitigate the growth of odor-causing bacteria. And that’s particularly useful information when dealing with activewear. Perspiration isn’t just water — it’s also composed of fatty acids and proteins that are expelled as part of our metabolic processes. All that sweat is a buffet for microbes, which produce that familiar “B.O.” stench.
So, Polartec ran some R&D trials on peppermint oil derivatives and found that not only was it 99% effective in microbial reduction initially, but it also maintained 99% effectiveness after 50 standard wash cycles.
And the odorless peppermint oil treatment passed the sniff test, too. In garment use trials, appointed “sniff judges” compared peppermint-treated, soiled performance fabrics against those treated with metal-derived antimicrobial treatments.
“This new odor-resist treatment [which uses] responsibly sourced, all-natural peppermint oil, aligns with our overarching Polartec Eco-Engineering mission,” said Karen Beattie, Polartec’s marketing manager. That mission is “to develop performance materials based in sustainable science.”
Learn more at Polartec.com.
