Crypto News: The toxic price of waterproofing

By Zahra Hirji and Olivia Rockeman

Patagonia, Inc. has spent nearly a decade rejiggering its supply chain, redesigning products and dumping millions of dollars into a high-stakes trial-and-error process that's nearly complete.

This isn't about optimizing for fashion. Patagonia, like practically every other outdoor apparel company, has long relied on per- or polyfluorinated chemicals — PFAS for short — to make its products water-resistant. The problem is that these chemicals are toxic. They've been linked to cancer and other health problems, discovered in drinking water and found in the human bloodstream. Despite years of warnings from scientists and environmental activists, many apparel retailers only recently started sussing out how to ditch PFAS in outdoor apparel. But the stragglers may not be able to straggle much longer: Bans on the chemicals are coming.

"We were looking for a magic chemistry that could do it all and get our performance back and keep your jacket waterproof," says Matt Dwyer, Patagonia's vice president of product impact and innovation. "And it took a whole lot more work than that."

The PFAS problem has been decades in the making. In the 1950s, Minnesota-based chemical maker 3M Co. launched Scotchgard that used fluorochemicals to make fabrics water- and stain-repellent. Within a few decades, the chemicals were ubiquitous in outdoor apparel and gear. That's because "they just blew everything apart in terms of how well they worked," says Richard Blackburn, a professor of sustainable materials at the University of Leeds. "From a chemical perspective, they are fantastic."

But that resilience is also a liability. Mike Schade, a campaign director with the environmental group Toxic-Free Future, notes that PFAS are harmful across their lifecycle: The manufacturing phase can impact factory workers and local water systems, while washing and owning jackets and other products coated with PFAS can potentially harm consumers. Indeed, 3M had known the chemicals were detected at elevated levels in its own workers by the mid-1970s.

"One of the reasons we're concerned about PFAS is because they're incredibly persistent chemicals," Schade says. "They're manufactured for food packaging or firefighting foam or rain jackets, and the chemicals don't go away when they're released into the environment." (This is why they are sometimes called "forever chemicals.")

After trying to find a "safer" version of PFAS, Patagonia decided to ditch them entirely almost a decade ago. But the first fabrics the company tested with PFC-free chemistries in 2015 "were stiff as paper and you could rip them in half," Dwyer says. After hundreds of sample trials testing out dozens of different chemistries, the company today uses about eight different PFAS alternatives for water-resistance, and aims for all products on its shelves to be "PFC-free" by the end of 2024. Last fall, Patagonia announced that 78% of its materials were already there.

A survey of more than a dozen other apparel-makers on their PFAS use yields a wide spectrum of results: Brands that include Canada Goose, Columbia Sportswear, Lululemon, L.L. Bean and Gore-Tex maker W.L. Gore & Co. are in the process of transitioning away from PFAS in their products, with varying timelines. Others, among them Adidas and Nike, haven't shared specific phase-out targets publicly or in response to Bloomberg Green's questions. Only a few, including Danish company Rains and Sweden's Fjällräven, have already phased out PFAS.

Time is of the essence here, as governments start to catch up to the indisputable science. In the US, roughly a dozen states already have policies banning or strictly regulating these chemicals in various products, and more restrictions are coming or being discussed specifically for textiles. In 2020, the Environmental Protection Agency halted the use of some types of PFAS in the manufacture, processing or importing of many consumer products pending agency review. And in the European Union, six countries submitted a proposal last month that would restrict the manufacture and use of PFAS across a range of product categories.

The growing urgency means companies that have made little progress thus far are effectively already behind. Fast-fashion retailers may be able to roll out new clothing lines in just a few months, but the rest of the apparel world takes one or more years to go from product design to store-ready.

"Our chemical crystal ball told us that these regulations and things like that we're going to happen at some point," says Dwyer at Patagonia, which is already working on its 2025 products. "Now we know they're in the very near future."

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Photographer: Alessia Pierdomenico/Bloomberg

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