Breathable, vegan synthetic textile coatings with INSQIN®

Whether they’re for footwear, sportswear, bags, automotive interiors, or furniture, synthetic functional textiles typically need to deliver high-performance properties such as durability, breathability, and water-repellence. As well as enabling individual product design features!

In recent years, demand has also increased for more sustainable fabrics. This includes textiles made with waterborne coating solutions, safer raw materials that don’t contain hazardous substances, natural fibers, and increasingly, vegan materials.

For manufacturers in the textile industry, there are two key challenges: certifying their products’ improved sustainability, and balancing this with technical performance.

For instance, to claim that a product is vegan, manufacturers must get certification from an accredited institute. This requires them to verify that both the raw materials and manufacturing process are free of animal-based components.

Brand owners and manufacturers can also face technical challenges in delivering more sustainable synthetic functional textiles. For instance, enabling water repellence without using per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Or enabling more breathable synthetic products that are also waterproof.

To tackle these challenges, we teamed up with Trans-Textil: a leading company in producing functional textiles through lamination, membrane technologies, coating, finishing, and printing.

Together, we developed and tested a new, highly breathable water-based polyurethane system that combines high performance with responsible product design. The coating layer for this system is based on our aqueous INSQIN® technology.

The result is AQUAIR® – a water-based coated textile material that combines breathability with waterproofing for maximum comfort. Trans-Textil also offers compatible seam-sealing tapes to enable waterproof seams in AQUAIR® products.

Because water-repellent properties are already integrated into AQUAIR®, no additional substances such as PFAS are needed. In fact, all its components and process steps meet OEKO-TEX®’s Standard 100 for processing without harmful ingredients.

AQUAIR® is also certified by the Pirmasens Testing and Research Institute (PFI) as ‘100% Vegan’ – confirming that the product, its raw materials, and its manufacturing process are not of animal origin. This includes the PU hotmelt lamination systems, as well as the textile substrates and membrane systems, used to manufacture the multi-layer composite products.

AQUAIR® is now being used in shoe components, sports clothing, bags, furniture, and more – including in small series, thanks to its versatile and flexible concept. The color and grain of its synthetic layer can be easily customized, enabling significant design freedom in all these products. And, thanks to the use of INSQIN®, these products require up to 95% less water and 50% less energy to make than when using a conventional production process.*

In this way, together with Trans-Textil, we’ve raised the standard for high-performance, responsibly produced vegan textiles to new levels!

*according to internal calculations