Outdoor brands need to show leadership on PFCs, Greenpeace says
11/09/2015
In a report entitled ‘Footprints in the Snow”, which it published on September 8, Greenpeace gave details of traces of PFCs that it had found in samples of snow and lakewater from ten places around the world that are popular among winter sports enthusiasts. It took the samples in May and June 2015 as part of a wider campaign called Detox, aimed at encouraging consumer product suppliers to remove hazardous substances from their supply chains.
Later in the report, the campaign group highlighted The North Face, Columbia, Patagonia, Salewa and Mammut as major outdoor brands that, in its opinion, have shown “little sense of responsibility” in introducing alternatives to PFCs to their product ranges.
In response, Patagonia said it has conducted extensive research of its own into DWR chemistry with the aim of finding technologies that will allow it to continue to have the high performance it wants in the jackets and other garments it offers to mountain enthusiasts, but with less environmental impact than PFCs. It said it has tested “about a dozen” fluorocarbon-free finishes for its garments, and that it is “getting close”.
Patagonia went on to say: “For the past decade, we’ve carefully researched and tested every available fluorocarbon-free alternative. Many finishes, including waxes and silicones, will lower the surface tension of a fabric enough to cause water to bead up and disperse rather than saturate, but they are easily contaminated by dirt and oil and rapidly lose their effectiveness, reducing the effective lifetime of a garment.” It argued that having to replace garments more frequently because they fail to function as well as outdoor enthusiasts would like will have a greater impact on the environment than using PFCs, especially the shorter-chain PFCs many brands are moving to, in a long-lasting product.
However, it said it does not feel comfortable “promising a path forward that hasn’t yet been identified”, calling the suggestion that it should do so That simply isn’t fair given the complexity of this challenge.”
Greenpeace Switzerland’s Mirjam Kopp is the campaign group’s project leader for the outdoor industry for Detox. Speaking to sportstextiles in the days following the publication of ‘Footprints in the Snow’, Ms Kopp said she hopes Patagonia’s tests bring success and that the company will soon be able to announce new DWR alternatives.
She said she has heard the argument about longer-lasting garments having a lower environmental impact from a number of brands, but that none of them, so far, has shown her a study showing that wax- or silicone-based alternatives are less effective. “I’d like to see the data,” she said. “It’s great to make products with a long lifespan, but in a lot of cases that’s not why consumers buy the products; instead they buy the garments because they are fashionable, and I’d like to see data about that too.”
Ms Kopp explained that outdoor brands now sell their products to “a broad audience” and that it’s not uncommon to see people wearing very expensive and high-spec jackets “just to cycle around the city”. She suggested that these jackets need not have the same DWR capability as ones that will genuinely be required to protect their wearers in harsh mountain conditions in winter.
On the subject of setting target dates for moving away from PFCs, she said: “It’s important to set deadlines. Clear and ambitious deadlines will help the outdoor industry bring to market the alternative technologies that we need.”
‘Footprints in the Snow’ offers no proof that the PFCs in the samples the Greenpeace researchers found in May and June this year came from outdoor garments or footwear, but Mirjam Kopp told sportstextiles that her organisation had deliberately chosen to “target” the outdoor industry before other prominent users of PFCs. “Outdoor brands rely on using nature in marketing,” she said, “and they frequently make a point of saying that they care about sustainability. What we think, therefore, is that the outdoor industry needs to be a leader in eliminating PFCs. It needs to set a good example.”
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