Finnish Olympic Team: SPINNOVA® materials Innovative Icepeak 2022 Winter Olympic Collection
Sustainable textile material company Spinnova and outdoor clothing brand Icepeak have worked together to create unique touches to the Finnish Olympic Team’s outfit for the XXIV Olympic Winter Games. The Finnish Olympic Team clothing is provided by Icepeak and it will include a bag made of sustainable SPINNOVA® materials.
Finnish Olympic Team’s New Sustainable Kit
HELSINKI, Oct. 27, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — With the XXIV Olympic Winter Games drawing nearer, the Finnish Olympic Committee and Icepeak are revealing the official outfit of the Finnish Olympic Team. This year, the outfit includes an over-the-shoulder-bag that is made of sustainable and circular SPINNOVA® materials. Both the bag and strap are made of SPINNOVA®, demonstrating the versatility of the material. The bag, along with the other items in the collection, are created by Icepeak.
“The Games bring different nations together to compete under mutual terms towards a shared goal. In the spirit of this collaboration, we joined forces with Icepeak from Luhta Group to create a fully circular sports bag that demonstrates the versatility of our sustainable material,” says Janne Poranen, CEO and Co-Founder of Spinnova.
Previously, Spinnova has collaborated with a Norwegian outdoor brand to make a fully circular backpack, making this collaboration Spinnova’s second product in the accessories category. SPINNOVA® is a new circular textile fibre made of sustainably sourced wood or waste, without harmful chemicals. It produces 65% less CO2 emissions and uses 99% less water than cotton production, and it does not contain any microplastics.
“We’ve been a partner of the Finnish Olympic Committee and official outfitter of the Finnish Olympic Team since 2016. We have renewed our firm commitment to sustainability this year and it has been exciting to try out new materials that make the collection more sustainable. When these new materials are carried by Finland’s Olympic athletes, we have an opportunity to amplify this message and bring sustainability to the podium. We also look forward to using more Spinnova’s materials at the Group level in the future,” says Tia Rantanen, Sustainability Director for Luhta Sportwear Company.
More products made of SPINNOVA® materials are on the way as Spinnova is in the process of scaling its material production. The first commercial-scale factory producing SPINNOVA® fibre is expected to be completed at the end of 2022, for the joint venture that Spinnova has with its strategic partner Suzano, the world’s largest cellulose producer. Spinnova’s long term business targets include reaching one million tonnes of annual SPINNOVA® fibre production capacity in the next 10-12 years.
CONTACT:
Lotta Kopra
Chief Commercial Officer
lotta.kopra@spinnova.com
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SOURCE Spinnova
About the Finnish Olympic Team’s Kit Partner: Spinnova
It was 2009. Technical Research Centre of Finland’s (VTT) cellulose expert Juha Salmela was researching nanocellulose. He attended a conference in Oxford university and heard a presentation from a leading spider researcher, who explained the similarities between spiderweb’s protein and nanocellulose.
That’s when an idea came to Juha: what if wood fibre could be spun into textile fibre in a similar way to this natural process? The professor immediately thought it was something Juha should look into and develop.
As part of an EU project, Juha and VTT began to take the innovation forward and soon applied for a patent for the idea. The innovation was fostered in VTT for some time. Once seeing this was the most prominent innovation within the nano and microcellulose field that he had ever seen, Janne Poranen, Head of Biomaterials research area at VTT, made a decision to spin the business off.
Janne asked Juha to join in and when getting a yes, the story of Spinnova began quickly. With the support of the first investors including the VTT, Spinnova was founded by Juha and Janne in January 2015.
In 2021, we have taken concrete steps towards our commercial phase. We have announced plans of scaling our production up with our partner Suzano, in a joint venture that will build our first commercial factory in Finland. The new factory is estimated to start operations at the end of 2022, producing the purest materials available for our brand partners. In June, we successfully listed on the Nasdaq Helsinki First North Growth Market to finance our further growth and scaling. Stay tuned for the next developments!
Read more: https://spinnova.com/about/
About the Finnish Olympic Committee
We act as a transformative force that, together with partners, ignites love for movement and a physical lifestyle. Our work emphasises cooperation not only with organised physical activity, but also with actors outside it. Our goal is a strong, positive and inviting discussion that combines the movement with quality of life, well-being, health, sociality and community. We want the physical lifestyle to become more common through cooperation between organised physical activity and actors outside it.
We value all ways of moving around and want as many people as possible to understand the importance of regular movement and exercise for well-being, move around on their own and act to increase mobility.
Work to promote movement and physical lifestyle is planned to be divided into the following areas:
- We build and lead networks of movement and the promotion of a physical lifestyle. In this way, we ensure that the promotion of movement and physical lifestyle in Finland is effective in a common direction.
- We influence the operating conditions through social relations. In addition to the national conditions, we affect the operating conditions in the regions and municipalities.
- We actively communicate movement and a physical lifestyle. We are stepping up the message with a broad campaign to encourage a physically active lifestyle.
- Together with our partners, we build business and exercise lifestyle promotion practices.
We are also developing a platform for business cooperation from the new position.
In 2022, the focus will be on launching the function and building a roadmap to promote movement and physical activity. In addition, it is important to strengthen partnerships that are already attached to the function and to start assembling new networks. The plan is to build new partnerships with people, especially those outside organised physical activity. We are also strengthening municipal partnerships.
Municipalities are the most important organiser of sports activities in the public sector, and in the future, due to the regional reform, physical activity will be an even greater part of the municipality’s tasks. In addition to working with members and regional sports organisations, we are developing the activities of the Mobility Path network of those promoting physical activity.
Within the sports community, we aim for change, where the whole community would have the will to develop and introduce inspiring low-threshold physical activity practices. In addition to the increase in movement and physical activity, it is also important for socially important that the weight and visibility of physical activity is strengthened in political decision-making and public debate. This will provide a basis for increasing movement and a physical lifestyle even more emphatically in the future.
Read more: Physical lifestyle – Finnish Olympic Committee (olympiakomitea.fi)
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