Blue is the new green

Camping has always been a green activity, but that movement has been taken onto the next level by Dutch tent brand Karsten with its latest development. The company’s Opera Blueline tent is what the company claims to be ‘the most sustainable tent out there’, as it produced completely with recycled materials.

How do they do it?

The Opera Blueline is made using a new material Karsten calls TenCate BlueCAMP cotton, which is a mix of high quality cotton and recycled jeans. That’s right! Your old, used denim has probably ended up on the Karsten production line to create this tent, which is also the reason why the tent has a stylish blue hue to its colouring.

In Europe, it is estimated that 640million jeans are thrown away every year – so Karsten decided to do something about that by collecting up a portion of those discarded garments. It then unravels them, spins them into new yarn and makes them into new tent cloth for its Blueline.

By using denim waste to create this tent, Karsten also reduces the amount of energy and water required to manufacture it. For example, to produce 1kg of cotton, you need around 8,000 litres of water. By replacing part of the cotton with denim, it saves on average an impressive 50,000 litres of water per tent produced. And because the cotton gets that natural blue colouring from the denim, there is no need to use dyes of any kind – another environmental saving.

Plastic power

Karsten wanted to make every aspect of this tent sustainable and from recycled materials, so it didn’t only focus on the cloth. The groundsheet, zippers and just about everything else on this tent are made from recycled plastic. During the manufacturing of the plastic bisonyl there is often a lot of leftover material that usually ends up in landfill – Karsten took these leftovers, pressed them together and made new components from them. The result is a durable, tough and much more sustainable groundsheet. And the zippers? Well they are made from simple recycled plastic bottles.

Close to home

The whole operation of producing this tent has also been made more local, thus drastically reducing the carbon footprint for Karsten. It collects the old garments, unravels them, spins new yarns and produces the tents all within its home country of the Netherlands and also in neighbouring Belgium. This means no shipments, no air freight and an altogether smaller carbon footprint for the whole process.

Tent specs

The design of the Karsten Opera Blueline is exactly the same as the Karsten Opera 2400: Big windows on either side, a spacious awning, a fold-out ground sheet and an extensive range of storage options. The materials used are just more sustainable. And that’s what makes camping that little bit extra carefree, even more than you were used to with Karsten.

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