Warming Up to Cruelty-Free Clothing

Feather down, wool suppliers work to erase animal welfare concerns tied to those materials

Recent heavy snowfall and cold temperatures mean it's time to bundle up, but the natural materials we so often turn to for warmth, feather down and wool, have a less-than-cozy history.

In recent years, following animal welfare groups' outcry over practices like force-feeding and live-plucking birds that produce down, leading outdoor industry brands Patagonia and The North Face have worked to craft and adopt standards to certify their feather down as free from these practices. Jackets and, as adoption spreads, other feather-filled products like pillows and comforters increasingly sport labels that mention the Responsible Down Standard or Traceable Down Standard.

Force-feeding fattens duck and goose livers to make for better foie gras, and 90 percent of the value of the bird is in its meat—its feathers comprise just 10 percent of the share. Live plucking forcibly removes feathers and can be done multiple times over the course of a bird's life. Suppliers say they see little of this left in their producers, pointing to the European collector model they often promote, where birds are raised like pets and left to roam their villages at will, but they've gotten on board with the audits and paperwork necessary to certify their down.

Forty clothing brands, including H&M, have adopted or are in the process of adopting the Responsible Down Standard, which The North Face helped launch but is now run by Textile Exchange, a nonprofit focused on promoting responsible and sustainable sourcing of textiles.

The Traceable Down Standard was developed by Patagonia and gifted to NSF International. This has been regarded as the more stringent standard but is difficult to scale because of its added layer of auditing parent farms. Patagonia is the go-to brand for TDS down.

Fjällräven was also an early leader in the cruelty-free down effort. Its standard has earned accolades from animal welfare advocacy group Four Paws for components like sending a veterinarian along on audits of farms, which occur more than once a year, and allowing birds to walk rather than transporting them in cages.

An estimated 1,200 farms and half a billion geese are now covered under the Responsible Down Standard, which has spread to 18 countries, many of them in Asia and Eastern Europe, where geese and ducks are raised for meat.

"The success of the Responsible Down Standard is so much thanks to down suppliers," says Anne Gillespie, director of industry integrity for Textile Exchange. "It feels like now it's just a question of keeping that momentum going."

The next goal will be to see wider adoption of the Responsible Down Standard among companies that make bedding. The price per kilo of down spiked after the last avian flu outbreak, but suppliers say it has since come down by as much as half, and that's helped to make spending a few extra dollars for certified down an easier sell.

Supplier Allied Feather & Down has launched Track My Down, which puts a QR code on a hangtag that directs customers to a website showing which country that down came from, what fill power it was tested at (600 fill or 900 fill, for example) and explaining other details, like care instructions. It's a way, Allied's Creative Director Matthew Betcher says, of bringing "the oldest insulation to the newest consumer."

A scalable global standard to do the same for the wool industry is still in the works and expected out this summer, Gillespie says. Textile Exchange will build off work some suppliers have done to certify wool as cruelty-free, as well as adding components to address the health of ecosystems where sheep graze. Those land-management measures will be aimed at preventing over-grazing, erosion and nutrient depletion or overloading from fertilizers or pesticides. It will also ensure ongoing biodiversity in ecosystems, some of which, like Australia, can be very sensitive. The challenge, Gillepsie says, will be to make sure site auditors are prepared to assess farms in a way that fits with the local geography. They're running pilot programs in multiple continents, including Australia, North America and Asia, and will even test the standard to see if it can translate easily to goat and alpaca farms. The animal welfare concerns particularly tie to efforts to eliminate problems with blowflies in Australia and New Zealand, and the standard will ban a process called mulesing, which has been decried by PETA.

Down and wool standards join existing industry standards for cotton, organic and recycled-content products, and forthcoming measures will address leather and plastic-based materials.

Down still provides the greatest warmth for its weight of any insulator out there, but it comes with a caveat.

"The problem with down is, when it gets wet, it doesn't work," says Edu Uribesalgo, innovation director for Spain-based clothing company Ternua. Ternua switched to using recycled down in 2013, realizing that the feathers often outlast their pillow casings and jacket shells (Patagonia is adding recycled down to their line as well), and this year, it will launch products with recycled down treated to be water repellent.

Responding to concerns about the chemistry used to make exterior layers water repellent, and realizing that the proposed substitutions are based in lipids like the fats and oils ducks and geese produce that causes water to bead off their feathers, down suppliers are using those options instead. They replace perfluorinated chemicals, which are used to make fabrics water and stain resistant and are now found in the global water supply, where they bioaccumulate in fish and wildlife.

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