Manufacturers are addressing this quirk by treating down with a hydrophobic mixture that helps it repel water. The main drawback, from an insulating standpoint, is that it doesn’t retain heat when it gets soaking wet, as moisture causes the structure to collapse. That ability to bounce back lasts for decades, crush after squash after squeeze.Īll of this makes down one of the best insulating materials in the world. So even if a hiker smooshes her down sleeping bag into a pack, the material recovers its shape quickly. “It’s the perfect combination of mechanical properties.” It isn’t just about providing warmth down is remarkably durable, lightweight, compressible, and springy. “Down gives amazing amounts of thickness with very, very little weight-that’s the key to its warmth,” says Matthew Fuller, a down expert and project engineer at outdoor gear company Mountain Equipment. (Feathers that cover down have quills with branched filaments that repel water and help birds fly). The complex structures, which are the size of dandelion blooms, trap air close to the skin, keeping waterbirds’ core temperatures toasty when the mercury plunges. Each down plume is a three-dimensional sphere consisting of a network of filaments that branch into barbs that branch into barbules. The Science of Downĭown feathers grow beneath stiffer exterior feathers. “The whole industry has changed for the better and really progressed,” says Melanie Lary, a campaigns officer for Four Paws. (While down bedding accounts for roughly half of the feathers harvested each year, outdoor bedding brands lag behind outdoor apparel companies in obtaining certification.) The list of brands using these standards, which have become stricter since 2010, is growing. They developed standards for ethically sourced down, putting in place traceability measures that now require on-site audits at the parent farms where egg-laying birds are kept, conditions under which birds live, and where they are killed. ”Ĭompanies including Patagonia, The North Face, and others quickly got to work tracing the material used in their products through the supply chain. The task was complicated because companies simply weren't sure where the down was coming from, says Bryan Mortensen, audits and certification director for the International Down and Feather Laboratory (IDFL), a group that tests and certifies down feathers and textiles. “They couldn’t trace it back. The effort started in 2010 when Four Paws, a Vienna-based animal welfare group, asked companies to show that their down was ethically sourced. “All of my recent work is about fighting this mentality, fighting taking things for granted.”Ĭonscientious consumers don’t have to go to the extremes Lo did to find products filled with ethically sourced down-today there are several standards that track the supply. “People don’t think about the source of their purchases because it’s all too convenient,” says Lo, whose work concentrates on human-animal relationships. When he wore the coat for just 30 seconds, his surface body temperature rose by about 4 degrees Fahrenheit. On an art fellowship to the Arctic, which spurred the project, he used thermal heat cameras to document his down coat’s insulating ability. It took him almost two months to collect the 3,000 down feathers that he washed and stuffed into a coat he’d gutted-less than half of the 8,000 typically found in a down jacket. Gathering down is a tradition that native people in the Arctic and farmers in Iceland and Norway have practiced for hundreds of years if not longer, but Lo was new to the method. Squatting and picking up each individual plume was a meditative process. So on summer mornings he pedaled to parks, ponds, and forests in search of loose down and small feathers left behind by geese. Animal welfare advocates consider these cruel practices that they want to see eliminated from down’s complex supply chain.Ĭoncerns about down sourcing spurred Taiwanese artist Sheng-Wen Lo to sidestep the entire down manufacturing process: In 2017 he decided to collect goose feathers and fill a coat himself. The vast majority of the 270,000 metric tons of commercial down produced each year is a byproduct of goose and duck meat industries in Asia and Europe, where the birds might be live-plucked or force-fed for foie gras before heading to the slaughterhouse. Yet the way some farmers harvest this fluffy material might make birders uncomfortable. There’s nothing quite like down-it’s a natural, incredibly warm, and breathable insulation that we stuff into winter jackets and sleeping bags, couches and blankets. No wonder ducks look so comfortable paddling around ponds on sub-zero days.
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