Almost exactly a year ago my colleague, Josh Ross, broke what became our biggest story of the year: PFC bans are set to change the face of all waterproof garments. If you haven’t already read that, I urge you to now, as it provides useful contextual information for what follows. Since that article was penned, the dust has settled somewhat and we are able to take the temperature of the industry as a whole. I’ll do my best to not rehash old information, but there may be some inevitable crossover, especially when setting the scene.
What follows is an attempt by Josh and I, primarily off the back of testing the best winter cycling jackets and the best waterproof cycling jackets respectively, to see if we can decipher which direction the future of waterproof clothing is heading. Was it right to say everything is going to change, or did we perhaps expect a greater pace of change than was reasonable from what is essentially an offshoot of the global chemical industry?
Shakedry, PFCs, and the accidental canary
I suspect, if you’re a keen cyclist (or perhaps a keen hiker or trail runner), that you’ll have come across Gore-Tex Shakedry. For many of us it represented the pinnacle of performance, right at the sweet spot where breathability, waterproof-ness, and packability intersect. And then, only a few years after its inception, Gore announced that it was set to retire the wonder fabric. In short, it wasn’t worth Gore’s while to produce; it was too costly, too time consuming, and for too small a population of users.
Had it not been retired then I suspect that nobody would have noticed the behind-the-scenes machinations going on in the industry, but as Josh found out, the retirement of Shakedry was something of an alarm call. While the impending ban mightn’t necessarily affect it, it turned the spotlight onto the industry as a whole just long enough for Josh to uncover the rumblings of industry-wide change. In short, a ban on PFCs (per-fluorinated compounds), or at least regulation heavily restricting their use, is set to upset the waterproof apple cart, particularly for Gore, which relies heavily on PFC’s for the creation of its waterproof membranes.
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