By Rob Lamme
If you are looking to do well outdoors this season while also doing some good, it’s never been easier.
“Green gear” – products made with sustainable materials and processes – are exploding throughout the marketplace, but perhaps nowhere more so than in outdoor products. It’s easy to understand why – stuff that helps you enjoy the natural world shouldn’t come from stuff that hurts it.
What is surprising is the variety of green products for outdoor consumers to choose from, most of it at competitive prices and offering good to great performance. Want warm wool socks made from recycled materials on organic farms with chlorine-free processing and containing materials sourced in the US and knitted right here in North Carolina with no sweat-shop labor? That’s a mouthful but Teko Socks (www.tekosocks.com) has your toes – and your conscience – covered. Or there is Bridgedale (www.bridgedale.com) which combines acrylic materials with – get this – bamboo.
REI (www.rei.com) makes going green easy. Just look for its ecoSensitive label on clothes to backpacks and most everything in between. All products with this designation are made with at 50 percent recycled materials and come in packaging made from recycled and other sustainable packaging. Goodbye bubble wrap!
Perhaps the most important of the green gear manufacturers is Polartec (www.polartec.com) which makes fabric for a great number of clothing companies. These days Polartec is teaming up with the likes of Patagonia, The North Face and some of your other favorite brands to provide fabric made from recycled polyester, using all those PET plastic products we so religiously throw in our recycling bins. But hey, it ain’t recycling unless somebody uses it a second time; Polartec’s engineers – bless their hearts – have figured out a way for all of us to have our plastic and wear it too. So look for a green ‘e’ on the hangtag the next time you shop for a coat and feel good that you’re doing your part. Or at least a bit of it.
If you are a stylista, going green does not mean wearing those hideous convertible pants with the zipper above the knees and other frumpy fashions. For an earth-friendly look that also looks good, check out Nau (www.nau.com) which proves that being pro-earth isn’t anti-style, or anti-performance. I put the very metrosexual Rebound jacket through its paces during a week of Utah skiing and it carved a fine line of fashion and performance the whole time. Oh, and did I mention it’s made from recycled polyester and can be – get this – recycled yet again, when (if?) it ever wears out?
For campers and backpackers, there is even more green gear to choose from. And make no mistake, the designs and materials are top-notch. I weathered a brutal weekend on top of Cold Mountain in western North Carolina in January (lots of cold, rain and wind, no Nicole Kidman) in a Go-Lite Trinity Jacket (www.golite.com), Sierra Designs Verde 20 sleeping bag (www.sierradesigns.com) and an Outdoor Research dry liner bag (www.outdoorresearch.com) for my Mountainsmith Approach backpack (www.mountainsmith.com) – all made from 100 percent recycled materials, mind you – and stayed warm and happy despite some very angry weather. Add a Big Agnes Salt Creek tent (www.bigagnes.com) – also made from recycled products – and you’ll be all reducing and reusing with every trip.
Finally, for those of you looking for an easy way to prove your green-ness, look no farther than your water bottle. Nalgene has developed a campaign (www.filterforgood.com) to get you sipping from a permanent, BPA-free bottle. More than 150,000 people have taken the company’s pledge to swear off bottled water, eliminating the need for an estimated 170 million plastic bottles and counting to date. Cheers and drink up!
# # #
Freelance writer Rob Lamme goes green from his home in Durham. Contact him at rob_lamme@yahoo.com.
