Millican is a sustainable travel and outdoor brand of bags & accessories for active, adventurous and eco-friendly types

MATERIALS WE USE

This is largely possible through crop rotation and the use of mainly composted fertilisers, providing more nutrients to the soil and allowing nature to take care of pests, weeds and diseases naturally.

In cotton growing areas, organic cotton can also be a catalyst for positive social change.  We like that a lot.  Organic cotton is much healthier for the farmers to handle and delivers a premium to their families, generally allowing for a better standard of living.

On the other side of the scale, as one of the most intensively farmed crops in the world, conventional cotton uses 10% of the world’s pesticides and 25% of the world’s insecticides - chemicals which cause major issues affecting the health of people, soil, water and air.
 
When it comes to water, you can fill 25 baths with the water it takes to grow the conventional cotton to make a T-shirt.  That would be less of an issue if cotton could be produced in the wet Lake District, but hey, we’ve not spotted any cotton fields here yet.

Finding a highly durable, certified organic cotton canvas was another matter all together.  To ensure longevity of our products, we set high performance standards for our materials from the start. 

After months of research and testing with Intertek, we found what we were looking for in Northern China:  high quality, IMO certified 100% organic cotton fibres spun into the organic yarns for our 20oz organic cotton canvas outer fabrics and 7oz organic brushed cotton lining.

We use our organic cotton for Dave, Stewart, Mark, Harry, Jonathan, Peter, Les and Derek.

DYEING & COATING
The next challenge was to find a certified dye & coating house as close to the fabric source as possible, equipped to handle organic materials with state-of-the-art waste treatment facilities.

We found the very thing in Eastern China, to apply GOTS certified dyes and weatherproof coating to our outer fabric.  Not exactly around the corner from the yarn spinners, but I guess we can’t have it all. Their on-site treatment facilities filter and re-filter the waste-water until it is back to its natural self, flowing into a large pond with 100s of fish.  Very convincing and very impressive. 

ORGANIC CERTIFICATIONS
Third party organic certification has proven crucial to us as a start-up brand.  We’ve visited most of our component suppliers in person, but have had to rely on others to help us understand the rest.

When faced with a myriad of certification options, licenses and companies, we felt the best place to start was at the top – Organic Exchange & GOTS, and their qualified certifying organisations IMO, Control Union and Soil Association.

GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard) certification covers fabrics or components from raw material, through production, to labelling of the final product.  We don’t qualify on all of the steps in the Millican process at this stage, but have made a great start.

For the certification aficionados out there, we’ve achieved the following so far: