As we head into November, it’s nice to think we’re still snugly nestled into pumpkin spice everything season… but let’s face it: anyone north of Chicago has probably already seen at least one soul-crushing snow flurry, if not more.
Which means winter is just a hot second away and, with it, the clogging of our entryways with oh-so-much cold weather gear. But what you might not know is that one winter staple – the puffy coat – has a dark side.
It’s been wreaking environmental havoc.
Down feathers, besides being expensive insulation, have fallen out of favor with some consumers due to reports that they are sourced from animals in particularly cruel ways. In their place has been a rise in the use of synthetic fibers created from polyester, which insulate well even when wet. But once these insulated coats have reached the end of their useful lifespan, there’s a big difference in how they biodegrade: Down feathers break down quickly, while synthetics can lay in a landfill for centuries.
But there may be a solution in sight. Wired is reporting that the material scientists as PrimaLoft, producer of synthetics for brands like Patagonia, are working on a new technology that biodegrades at a much faster rate than existing fluff.
Dubbed PrimaLoft Bio, the product is comprised of essentially the same synthetic fibers as before, but with an additive that makes the molecules “more attractive” to whatever microorganisms cause their breakdown in a landfill. Under lab conditions, testers found that the PrimaLoft Bio was almost fully decomposed in just over a year, whereas traditional synthetic fibers would barely decompose at all in that timeframe. In real-world conditions, scientists believe the new material will take longer than that to break down but will improve upon the existing timeframe of synthetics by a factor of 10.
Organic chemist Charles Lancelot was a consultant on the new fiber and he said that fully breaking down landfill waste was the path towards making these sites “productive.” For example, if you took the volume of synthetic polyesters that are currently winding up as trash every year and biodegraded them completely, “the gas they produced could be converted to 23 billion kilowatt hours of electrical energy—enough to power more than 2 million US homes for a year.”