About
Recycled plastic is the easy part. The hard part is everything else.
Most outdoor brands tell you a percentage and stop. We would rather give you the tonnage, the addresses, the laboratory and the three things we still get wrong.
The material
Where the plastic actually comes from
Three fishing cooperatives — Peniche and Matosinhos in Portugal, A Coruña in Galicia — bring back the plastic their nets drag up along with the catch. We pay €0.80 per kilo, weighed at the quay, cash the same week. In 2025 that came to 22.4 tonnes across the three ports.
It is sorted by polymer in Guimarães, rinsed in cold water rather than hot, shredded into flake, spun into yarn and woven into a 70-denier ripstop at 96 g/m². No virgin plastic enters the yarn at any point.
Then it gets coated. This is the step brands tend to skip over in their copy: the backer is laminated with a non-porous hydrophilic PU membrane, 18 micron, applied solvent-free. It is a plastic layer, and it is why the jacket is waterproof at all.
Material passport · Breakwater Shell
| Recycled content | 94% by weight |
| Bottles per jacket | 34 |
| Price paid per kilo | €0.80, cash on the quay |
| Collected in 2025 | 22.4 tonnes |
| Face fabric | 96 g/m² recycled ripstop |
| Membrane | PU, 18 micron, solvent-free |
| Finish | PFC-free C0 water repellent |
| Offcuts reused | 71% — the rest goes to insulation |
The workshop
Rua da Boavista 118, Alcântara, Lisbon
Ground floor, north-facing windows, a five-minute walk from the Lisbon–Cascais line. Nineteen people: four cutters, eleven machinists, two tapers, one press tester and a manager who has been sewing technical outerwear since 1998.
Everyone is directly employed on a Portuguese contract with health cover, not through a subcontractor. Wages sit 14% above the sector minimum for the region. Tours run on Fridays at 15:00 — write to us and we will put you on the list.
The factory
Sewn in the city we sell from
Almost no waterproof outerwear is made in Western Europe any more, because it is cheaper not to. We keep it in Lisbon for two reasons: we can walk downstairs and check the taping, and a repair takes nine days instead of nine weeks.
Cutting, sewing, taping and pressure testing all happen in the same room. Every jacket is tested at the shoulders at 0.4 bar before it is boxed — the one place a shell fails first.
Certifications
What the logos actually mean
A certificate is a claim about a factory, a fibre or a chemical — not about a jacket. Here is what each of ours covers, and what it does not.
| Certificate | Covers | Does not cover |
|---|---|---|
| GRS 4.0 | Chain of custody for the recycled yarn, audited annually | Working conditions at the spinning mill |
| bluesign APPROVED | Chemistry used in dyeing, coating and finishing | Where the fibre was collected |
| PFC-free C0 finish | No fluorocarbons in the water repellent | Durability — C0 needs reactivating sooner |
| OEKO-TEX Standard 100 | No harmful residues in the finished fabric | Anything about the environment |
| B Corp pending | Our whole operation, verified by a third party | Nothing yet — the assessment is not finished |
The B Corp line is deliberately unfinished. We are 14 months into the assessment and do not expect to pass before 2027, so the logo is not on any product page.
Honestly
Three things we have not solved
If a sustainability page has nothing unfinished on it, it is not a report. It is advertising.
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The membrane is still virgin PU
There is no recycled waterproof membrane on the market that passes our testing at 28,000mm. That 6% of the jacket is fossil-derived, and we have not found a supplier who can change that yet.
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Shipping is not clean
A jacket sent to Germany carries roughly 400g of CO₂ in transport. We buy removals for it, which is a payment, not a solution.
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29% of our fabric offcuts
Those go into building insulation rather than back into jackets. Downcycling is better than landfill and worse than we would like.
Shipping
Free over $120 in the EU and UK. Two to four days inside Iberia, three to six across the EU. Tracked, and the box is unbleached recycled board with no plastic inside.
Returns
Thirty days, prepaid label in the box, no questions. Worn is fine as long as it is clean. We resell returned jackets as “second life” at 40% off rather than shredding them.
Repairs
Five years free on seams, zips and taping, then at cost price for the life of the jacket. Average turnaround nine working days. Send it in through the contact page.