Sustainability

Sustainability claims should be specific. This page sets out what we do, what documents exist to back it, and where we cannot make a claim.

Care & Fair, with two schools we fund

We have been a member of Care & Fair since we founded the atelier in 2006 (the European carpet trade's initiative against child labour). What that involves:

Annual audits. Care & Fair sends auditors to looms across India and Nepal every year to verify worker conditions, that no children are weaving, and that the weavers we work with are paid fairly.
Our own visits, twice a year. We do not delegate this. We travel to the looms ourselves twice a year, on top of the Care & Fair audits.
Two schools. Since the founding of TVR, we have funded two schools for weavers' children through Care & Fair. They have been operating throughout the company's history.

Water: the part that usually gets hidden

Dyeing wool and silk uses water and (in our case) Swiss chemical dyes; see Craftsmanship for why we chose chemical over natural. The question is what happens to the dye-bath water afterwards.

Our dye supplier was the first in their region in India to receive the Indian government's eco-certification for cleaning and filtering the dye wastewater before release into the public sewers. The supplier holds those certificates.

We do not hold the certificates ourselves; they belong to the dyehouse, not to us. But the work behind them is the reason we chose this supplier, and the reason we have stayed with them.

Wool: small-scale, hand-spun, not certified

We do not hold GOTS, Responsible Wool Standard, or any of the other industry certifications you may see on industrial textile brands. The honest reason: our wool is hand-spun by individual spinners in their own villages and homes across Himalayan India, Nepal, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The certifications are designed for industrial supply chains, and ours is not one. We could not pretend to qualify.

What we can verify:

The wool is local to each region we source from
It is hand-carded and hand-spun (see Craftsmanship)
We have known many of the spinner families for over a decade: relationships, not contracts

A certificate would be easier to put on a page. This is what our supply chain actually looks like.

Built to be repaired, not replaced

We run a repair station in our Belgian atelier. A hand-knotted carpet is repairable, indefinitely, by people who know how it was made. That is the point.

Master at the loom in the TVR Belgian atelier, re-weaving a carpet from our GRUNGE collection that was sent in for repair.

Some examples of work we have done:

Repair after damage. A client's dog bit a piece out of a TVR carpet. We re-wove the missing section in Europe, match-dyed the yarn ourselves, and the repair is invisible. It looks like new.
Resize. Clients move house, the carpet needs to be smaller. We can recut and re-bind.
Split. One large piece becomes two, one for each room.
Reshape. Rectangular to round.

A high-quality TVR hand-knotted carpet lasts 20 to 30 years or more, depending on how intensively it is used, and with careful use it passes to the next generation. Every piece in our collections is built to that standard.

Packaging: one thick wrap, instead of many

This part does not flatter us.

We do use plastic to ship carpets. The reason: a hand-knotted carpet is heavy, travels internationally, and crosses multiple climates and handling chains. Paper and cotton are not strong enough for that. They tear, they get wet, the carpet ends up damaged on arrival. A damaged carpet is the worst possible outcome.

What we do is use a single layer of industrial-grade plastic per carpet, instead of the multiple thin wraps that are standard in the trade. Less plastic per carpet, fewer materials thrown away, the carpet arrives intact. It is not zero-plastic. It is less plastic than the alternative we tested.

A note on our tufted line

The claims on this page apply to our hand-knotted carpets. For large hospitality and hotel projects, we also produce tufted carpets as a separate product line. The differences matter:

We use a cotton backing on our tufted pieces (not synthetic backing where we can avoid it).
We use glue to hold the tufted yarn to the backing. Every tufted carpet in the world uses glue; there is no glue-free tufted process. We tell clients this openly.
On request, we will specify the primary fibre as TENCEL or viscose instead of standard tufting yarn. TENCEL is made from certified wood pulp through a closed-loop solvent process, which is why it is the one we recommend of the two.

The tufted line is a different product category, engineered for high-traffic commercial flooring. It should not be compared to our hand-knotted work on the same sustainability terms, and we do not pretend it can be.

Sustainability

Sustainability

Care & Fair, with two schools we fund

Water: the part that usually gets hidden

Wool: small-scale, hand-spun, not certified

Built to be repaired, not replaced

Packaging: one thick wrap, instead of many

A note on our tufted line

See also