OUR ENVIRONMENT


A farmer in Western Russia. Down supply chain audit, 2014.


Birds in China able to exhibit natural behaviour. Down supply chain audit, 2011.


Why were outdoor gear companies, whose staff tend to care about nature, buying down from wildfowl farms like this? Despite many of them worrying about saving rainforests and making fleeces out of recycled bottles, it turned out that only two outdoor brands really knew where their down came from. Then, videos of gruesome foie gras production and farm-workers standing on birds’ necks while ripping their feathers out went viral. Once they’d set them squawking in panic, welfare charities gave gear companies a few year’s grace to track down where all their down came from and to revolutionise bird-farming practices around the world. And if they failed? Campaigns would kick off even harder, demanding that down be banned, like animal fur. Fast forward to the present: are there now viral videos of happy ducks and geese splashing about on ponds? Apparently not. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) recently renewed their anti-down campaign, claiming not much has changed. So what has happened since then?


WHERE DOES DOWN COME FROM? Immediately after the media exposes in 2012, Steve Richardson, then


Head of Material Development at proudly-ethical company Patagonia, set off to track down some of the farms supplying their down, then put his hands up. The Telegraph reported his response from Hungary: “There was no doubt that these geese were used to make foie gras.” So why didn’t most outdoor gear companies know where their down


was coming from? Let’s imagine for a second, Kristian the Hungarian down collector, or Lei Wei the Chinese one pulling into the dusty yard of a local family. There are a handful of birds, amongst other livestock, wandering around. Some have just been killed for their meat, so he’s come


“VIDEOS OF GRUESOME FOIE GRAS PRODUCTION AND FARM-WORKERS STANDING ON BIRDS’ NECKS RIPPING THEIR FEATHERS OUT WENT VIRAL”


44 | CLIMB. WALK. JOIN.


to pick up a bag of down. Earlier, the farmer’s wife used a sticky wax to rip feathers and down from the bird carcasses, before washing them in a basic detergent. There are maybe 50 families in his local area who have a handful of birds. Once he’s collected all the down that’s going, he’ll sell it onto a wholesaler. This is a collection-based down supply chain — a very common way that down begins its journey to your wardrobe. Basically, trying to trace where a jacket’s worth of down has come from is an Odyssean feat, ending in thousands of tiny family-run bird-farms in distant lands where they don’t necessarily share our Western empathy with animals. 80% of the world’s down comes from China, and much of the rest from Eastern Europe. It seemed an impossible task to trace and monitor down supply. But then surprise number two happened. Just after the fluffy stuff erupted all over prodding journalists, and while other outdoor brands were scratching their heads, Cheshire-based brand Mountain Equipment (ME) calmly launched a website called Down Codex. They’d seen the animal welfare storm approaching from Germany back in 2009, when charities over there started kicking off about down. Since then, Mountain Equipment told me, they had been reforming their supply chain. Back then, small Scandi-brand Fjallraven were the only others who’d attempted to trace their down. How did they do it?


MOUNTAIN EQUIPMENT’S DOWN CODEX


Thinking outside the box, the British brand employed the International Down and Feather Testing Laboratory (IDFL) to visit slaughterhouses and farms in their supply chain, and make reports on what went on, complete with photographic evidence. As down testers, IDFL were already active on the ground and knowledgeable. No experts in farming, Mountain Equipment’s staff then pored over the RSPCA’s Freedom Food initiative, and came up with a set of reasonable rules about bird welfare. Reading the animal rights riot act to disbelieving Chinese and Hungarian farmers must have raised a few eyebrows, but gradually they cultivated their supply chain so they were only buying down that came from decently-treated birds. Nowadays there’s a code on every Mountain Equipment down product.


Type this into their Down Codex website and you can find out what type of farm the down in it came from. It’s not a new idea (Icebreaker launched Baacode in 2008) but it was a much bigger undertaking as wildfowl don’t handily live on huge ranches in former English colonies. When the Down Codex website launched with impeccable timing in 2012, others began quietly coming to them for advice.


PHOTO: VIER PFOTEN INTERNATIONAL.


PHOTO: MOUNTAIN EQUIPMENT.


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