When we started Anaskela in 2017, we had a single stubborn requirement: every towel we made had to make the ocean cleaner, not dirtier. Three years and a lot of unglamorous phone calls later, here is where our material actually comes from — and why the words on our tag mean something specific.

Step one: where the plastic begins

Our yarn starts life as two kinds of plastic. Roughly 70% is post-consumer PET — ordinary soft-drink and water bottles collected through municipal recycling in Greece, Italy and Portugal. The other 30% is ocean-bound PET, defined by Ocean Cleanup as plastic that would have reached the sea within five years if nothing had been done. Our ocean-bound supplier operates on the Greek-Albanian coast, where unsupervised dumping into rivers has historically been a problem.

We buy both streams. The post-consumer side keeps our pricing where it needs to be. The ocean-bound side costs about three times as much per kilogram and keeps our purpose where it needs to be. The ratio is checked by an independent auditor every quarter.

Step two: from flake to filament

Bottles arrive at the first processing facility in bales. They are sorted by colour, shredded into flakes, washed in warm detergent to remove labels and adhesives, dried and extruded into pellets. The pellets are then re-melted and drawn through a spinneret — think of a shower head — to produce the raw filament.

Our filament is micro-denier, meaning each thread is around 0.5 denier (roughly 7 micrometres across). It takes about five standard 500 ml bottles to make the yarn for one of our full-sized towels.

“We do not claim to be climate-neutral. We claim to be measurably better than the status quo, and we show our work.”

Step three: dyeing and weaving

Dye-houses are, historically, the dirty secret of textiles. A single conventional cotton t-shirt can require 2,700 litres of water to produce, much of it polluted at the dye-stage. We work with a solution-dye method: pigment is added to the molten PET before extrusion, so the colour is inside the fibre rather than painted on. This cuts water use in dyeing by around 90% compared to standard reactive dye processes.

Weaving happens at a family-run mill outside Thessaloniki that has been in textiles since 1972. They work exclusively with recycled yarns now — a transition they made in 2019 and have not regretted. The looms are modern air-jet machines, but the pattern-matching and finishing is done by hand.

Step four: printing in Athens

Our prints are applied by digital inkjet at an atelier in Piraeus using OEKO-TEX ECO-PASSPORT certified inks. Digital printing uses dramatically less water and dye than screen printing, and allows us to produce in small batches rather than carrying large stock. Each design is proofed on paper, then on cloth, and only then produced in a run of a few hundred.

What we still find hard

Three honest problems. First, microfibre shedding: our fabric sheds less than a conventional fleece, but it still sheds. We ship each towel with a 10% discount code for a Guppyfriend wash bag from a Berlin maker. Second, shipping: we are a global brand with a Greek supply chain, which means a lot of the carbon in our product is airfreight. We are moving to sea-freight-plus-last-mile-electric where we can, but it is slower and we are still learning. Third, end of life: we take worn-out towels back by post and feed them into an industrial textile-to-fibre recycler in northern Italy. The programme is small, but growing.

The point

Supply chains should be legible. If you want to see our quarterly audit report, write to [email protected] and we will send you the latest. It is not glossy. It is 11 pages, mostly tables, and we are proud of every number in it — even the ones that are smaller than we hoped.