Eco friendly riding gear nowhere near as rufty tufty ?

I can't help comparing , if the old versions lasted about 10 years and the new last half that time then surely the older are the " greenest" and more sustainable?

New ones are more comfy for riding but not worth the £150rrp especially as they aren't waterproof.

I'd imagine that the shipping cost for lighter weight materials in bulk is probs. less than heavier weight? If you're shipping vast quantities from the far east in bulk containerships, perhaps the costs savings are worth the few replacement pairs you might have to send out to folks who actually go on to use this kits for its intended purpose.

So are the current Endura offerings as tough as they used to be ?

Some of the chemicals have actually been banned. Thought there was a STW article a while back but it might have been this one, which is all I can find. What I remember is that things will need reproofing quite a bit more often.

https://www.bikeperfect.com/news/expect-some-big-changes-to-waterproof-jackets-in-2023

Yes I've noticed it. All the tops that proudly claim to be made from recycled material/fibres look as knackered as tops I've had for years with a tiny fraction of the wear. I've got Endura and Nukeproof recycled jerseys with the same problems.

The Nukeproof jersey I got lasted one ride. We are talking a few hours here, without crashing and has pulls all over the place. I got a refund!

Absolute shite and a backward step.

I sometimes ride with the guy that owns a mtb clothing company https://wetheriders.com.au/

Really nice gear. He recently started doing a really nice airy low impact (85% recycled PET bottles) fabric. I've crashed pretty heavily on a rocky track (wrecked my helmet and derailleur) and the shirt held up. However, where my hip pack rubs around my waste the shirt is suffering. I've got some really old t-shirts that show no signs of this at all.

But lifecycle impact is pretty complex across production, transport, etc etc.

I ride in a couple of years old Patagonia Capilene Cool shirt made from recycled polyester. This thing is indestructible! It shows signs of wear as you'd expect but given some of the crashes it's been through it's done very well.

The poor quality is not due to being made out of recycled materials, it is due to poor quality manufacturing and materials. Personally I also do not want to buy anything made in the Far East anymore, and have looked for and found European alternatives.

There are still many companies making good quality stuff locally. My latest rain jacket is from Swedish Houdini, made in Baltic countries and with repair service available also. Very lightweight, very waterproof, with ecological fabric coating and it has lasted me over 3 years of near-daily use so far. They make multi-sport stuff(running, skiing, walking) but many of their offerings work on the bike too. I have this https://houdinisportswear.com/en-us/clothing/jackets/ms-bff-jacket-246394

Houdini was the first manufacturer to completely stop the use of PFAS in their clothing. https://houdinisportswear.com/en-us/sustainability/sustainability-status-100

Also https://www.vaude.com/int/en/ seems good, use recycled and eco-friendly materials, wife has several items from them and she has not had complaints. Löffler too still manufactures in EU.

I used to have Endura clothes too, but their durability has been hit and miss - some stuff worked well, some broke pretty fast, and one old Stealth jacket came completely undone from the taped seams - the tape just peeled completely off after a year of use. Another one is still good though. Some pants lost waterproofness quite fast, and their sizing is all over the place - some that fit me are Medium, on others I need XL. Stopped buying their stuff a few years back.

For winter stuff, brands like Norwegian Trimtex and DeVold for high quality merino stuff, DeVold also now has Mtb shorts and jackets made of tight weave merino.

https://cimacoppi.cc/en/content/18-simbiosis-collection makes good summer / gravel clothing stuff.

My latest rain jacket is from Swedish Houdini, made in Baltic countries

…from Japanese fabric? But I see where you’re coming from with the local assembly/construction.

I understand that some recycled material/fabric claims obscure a bizarre ‘recycling’ technique - the production of eg virgin bottles that are then shredded to be turned into ‘recycled’ fibres.  Weird! This is in addition to the ‘greenwashing’ nature of bottles->clothes touched on in https://www.circularonline.co.uk/news/clothes-made-from-recycled-plastic-bottles-adding-to-fashions-waste-crisis/

Endura clothing has received a few comments on here on its various qualities. On the whole I’ve found Endura outer shorts to be nicely designed and well made. Just the seams and stitching could be a bit more robust.

Anyone noticed how as you’ve got older things like, say, shorts or tops don’t seem to last as long? I wonder if it’s the clothes or us that are changing.

Maybe we are riding more rad as we get older ? 🤔

Being serious though the replacement trousers Pearl Izumi have sent me I can't see them lasting too many rides . The lack of more robust material in the seat area just baffles me and those vents on the inner thighs are just asking for trouble 🙄

Still the reinforcement on the knees will come in handy to pray for some decent kit !

It's not as if the ones that went through in holes had had a hard life 😔

prettygreenparrot - yeah, but at the very least Houdini tells you the origin of all their fabrics, and they even list the companies that actually make their garments on their pages. I am not aware of any other company going so far with transparency. (I live in Finland so the Baltics and Sweden are next door, as far as that goes)

Maybe we are riding more rad as we get older ? 🤔

I wish. I fear it is the extra strain on fabrics and seams from ageing bodies ☹️

I've got quite a few pieces of clothing made from recycled materials now, mostly from Patagonia, and so far they're doing pretty well, so I think it's largely down to quality and what's spec'ed rather than where it's coming from.  If it turns up  paper thin,,, then it generally won't last long.

I guess that we're going to need to reproof waterproofs a bit more often in the future is just how it's going to be if we don't want to use toxic chemicals, and don't yet have an alternative

Well that's reassuring, just read on the Pearl Izumi website their products carry a lifetime warranty 👍 Reading the small print the lifetime of their products is 5 years according to them and if they fail due to manufacturing faults or poor material they will replace them 👍

<li style="text-align: left;">5 years peace of mind 🤔 Lol pretty green parrot 😁

I’ve got quite a few pieces of clothing made from recycled materials now, mostly from Patagonia, and so far they’re doing pretty well

Another vote for Patagonia here.

I’ve also got a Gore waterproof jacket that’s lasted twice as long as the two Endura MT500s that preceded it.

Icebreaker are spendy but seem very durable.

My experience has generally been that I get what I pay for.

Get what you pay for is ok but £150 for trousers?

While checking out the alternatives I see Patagonia Dirt Craft for £70 odd half price anybody tried these ?

There's loads going on. Generally modern fabrics have more tear and abrasion resistance than they used to have relative to weight, but recycled fabrics vary depending on the process, but broadly speaking, recycled Polyester - made almost exclusively from waste plastic bottles etc - is pretty much okay. I wonder if what's happening is that the brands are using Polyester rather than Nylon (aka Polyamide) fabrics because it's still far harder to create recycled Nylon fabrics and Polyester generally is simply less robust than Nylon, all other things being equal.

It's why the face fabrics on, say, mountaineering shell jackets, tend to be Nylon rather than Polyester - better outright robustness (abrasion resistance, cut resistance etc) relative to weight. It's not quite that simple, some Polyesters are quite durable, but it may be that something like that is going on.

The other obvious change is that fluoro-chemicals are no longer being used for DWR (durable water repellant) treatments, and the latest DWRs just don't work as well as the older, evil ones. In particular, they get contaminated far more easily. The cuffs on a new Gore-Tex jacket I've been using started soaking up water within hours, presumably because my skin had screwed up the DWR in that area. Patagonia has supposedly got a fluoro-free DWR that's also oil resistant due out soon.

Gore-Tex is actually part-way through changing its membrane to one produced without fluoro chems - ePE rather than ePTFE - as a result of all this. Basically the old membrane production process means the fabrics can't be certified as sustainable and are increasingly a non-viable option.

But anyway, as far as mountain bike shorts go, my guess is lighter fabrics using Polyester rather than Polyamide because recycling. But I'm by no means an expert on that. Or anything much else to be honest. One thing they don't tell you is that Polyester clothing itself is very rarely recycled, most recycled fabrics are made from plastic waste, mostly bottles, so far all the talk of circular processes, the whole thing is very much in its infancy. Even when clothing is touted as being 'recyclable', the mechanism doesn't exist.

Even on a really basic level, like infrastructure to return end of life clothing to the brand. Patagonia, who are pretty much the gold standard for this stuff, does free repairs and has something called Worn Wear where they repair and sell used Patagonia clothing rather than allowing it to be trashed. They just fixed a mountaineering jacket from around 2001 for me - new zips basically - for free. I can't think of many brands who'd do that.

Tbh, technical outdoors and cycling clothing is a drop in the ocean next to the fashion industry. What we need to to make less stuff, make the stuff we do make more robust, fix it when it stops working, then fix it again, and then find ways of re-using it once it's truly borked. The most sustainable stuff is the stuff we don't make in the first place.

TLDR: I wonder if it's down to more brands using Polyester rather than Nylon fabrics because recycled Polyester is far more available, but also less tough. I also cynically wonder if smarter brands are not unaware than really tough technical clothing simply means it doesn't need replacing as often, which in turn means they sell less over time 🙁

I’ve also got a Gore waterproof jacket that’s lasted twice as long as the two Endura MT500s that preceded it.

I've visited Gore's Bavarian testing and development facility. They're insanely thorough when it comes to evaluating components used in their fabrics, for example, all the face fabrics used with Gore-Tex are lab-assessed for abrasion resistance, colour fastness etc, etc. They also have very tight control over the manufacturing. It's one of the reasons the stuff is expensive.

You mean like my " ancient" Endura Single-track s that could probably survive armaggedon 💪

I was going to start by saying to the headline "well yeah, but is that news?" - it's like cleaning products, when I try to get eco friendly versions of them and the OH reminds me that they're flipping useless and you actually need the hardcore chemical versions in order to get anything clean. Vinegar and fairy wishes doesn't work as well as bleach!

But reading through the thread it also struck me that there's a slight confusion of cause and effect here:

I’ve got a pair of Endura Single-track trousers that have to be at least 10 years old and the difference is astonishing. They weigh about 3 times as much and are definitely bombproof

Endura went absolute bobbins about 10-12 years ago: the Singletracks up to about 2014 were some of the best and hardest wearing shorts I've ever owned, and if I'd know I would've bought 8 pairs to last me the rest of my life. Then they were hit by the cost-cutting that every company seems to have undergone in the past 10 years, and suddenly their Singletracks seemed to be made out of recycled bin bags. Nothing like as good or as hardwearing - with the benefit that people presumably ended up buying new shorts more often.

I wonder if the "ohh but they're eco friendly!" is just a good cover for them being absolute rubbish for proper riding.

I think they have improved their product a bit since then, but they're still nothing like as good as those old v1 and v2 Singletracks

My experience has generally been that I get what I pay for.

Same here, I'm increasingly becoming more picky about where I shop for bike clothes, and I'm always aiming/trying to do more with less. The better quality stuff costs more fo'shure (sometimes by quite a lot), but the difference in quality is massively noticeable. For instance I've a pair of Mission Workshop Transverse shorts that I bought in 2014 that are still essentially brand new looking. OK the seat is a bit discoloured, but apart from that no loose threads, no rips or tears, no holes...I just bought some 7mesh glidepath trousers that are really well tailored for MTB with thoughtfully design and really good quality fabric.

MTB is really a long way behind in this stuff I think, the amount of square cut polyester jerseys being sold as "technical" clothing that doesn't last a year is depressing.

I ride in a couple of years old Patagonia Capilene Cool shirt made from recycled polyester

and

The poor quality is not due to being made out of recycled materials

I have a similar Patagonia t-shirt. One of those which I used for a good few years, it fell to the back of the drawer and is now getting a second lease of life. Just quietly gets on with it - its like new, doesn't smell, fits well, as bombproof as a t-shirt needs to be. I'm trying to wear stuff out more before I buy new but realising how hard it is to do that - all my gear is years even decades old.

Thought I'd read the labels on the different trousers I've got . The modern ones have a mix of Nylon and Polyester, the old version Endura's are 100% Nylon . This kind of underlines the thought on here that Polyester is the problem being a less robust material.

Dunno, I'm sure most of my MTB wardrobe is polyester and nothing really seems to wear out.

Never deliberately bought anything "eco friendly" to wear when riding, but I do think a lot of modern MTB clobber is better designed than it used to be. I don't seem to wear through as many arses as I used to anyway 😀

I wonder if it’s down to more brands using Polyester rather than Nylon fabrics because recycled Polyester is far more available, but also less tough. I also cynically wonder if smarter brands are not unaware than really tough technical clothing simply means it doesn’t need replacing as often, which in turn means they sell less over time

Could well be.

Endura outer shorts to be nicely designed and well made. Just the seams and stitching could be a bit more robust.

Boeing 737s seem well made, they just sometimes forget to do some of the bolts up.

 wonder if it’s down to more brands using Polyester rather than Nylon fabrics because recycled Polyester is far more available, but also less tough. I also cynically wonder if smarter brands are not unaware than really tough technical clothing simply means it doesn’t need replacing as often, which in turn means they sell less over time

Checked the labels and yes you are right.