[mikestew]

People are moving away from Gore-Tex, especially as the new jackets simply work worse…

Eh? Typo? Why move away from GoreTex if the new jackets are worse?

As a big user of GoreTex, I’m hoping you meant to say the new jackets are better.

[justinator]

No. The newer GoreTex jackets work worse than previous ones. Much of it has to do with the DWR. The previous DWR that has now been banned for its inclusion of PFAS (forever chemicals) which did a much, much better job than the newer, non-PFAS DWR. This switch happened in the States last year I believe.

Gore-Tex these days is not made out of Teflon itself (as the fine article talks about) and its replacement is fine. As the article also points out the patent has been expired for some time and replacements have cropped up. The direct replacements are all fine too.

But without a DWR that works really well, you never have the right conditions to allow water vapor to escape from inside the jacket. Again as the article points out Gore-Tex performs well in the lab, which does not transfer to real world conditions.

So you have a problem where GoreTex kind of just acts like a much cheaper material, at a much greater expense. For those situations (most) you may as well just use a simpler, impermeable material (siliconed-coated nylon, for example) and vent it mechanically (open up a zipper).

The exception is actual alpine conditions, where precipitation is falling as something frozen (snow). There's really no need for the DWR to work perfectly to bead up the water on the surface, as it's not actually liquid.

But even then, much of a layer system for conditions is about control how much moisture you trap within your clothing. You climb a mountain, you sweat. What are you gunna do about it? Wearing a waterproof jacket is sometimes not what you wanna do at all, to keep your layers as dry as possible, and only put the jacket on when conditions require it (it's snowing, or it's so cold you need to trap the warmth in, even though that traps perspiration in too).

And if you don't like PFAS and forever chemicals, you're not going to like microplastics, the majority of which are from rubber car and truck tires. Electric cars -- being heavier -- wear out tires faster and are more of a problem in this respect. We don't talk about this much because we can't live in a world without cars.

[mikestew]

Thanks for the detailed clarification. As to the DWR, my experience says that the best GoreTex jacket is one without a nylon outer layer, and therefore no need for DWR. The GoreTex Shakedry jackets finally delivered on the promise GoreTex had made for 50 years. And they did it by just giving you a jacket made out of a sheet of GoreTex and nothing else. No nylon outer layer, no need to mess with DWR. As it turns out, none of that was necessary to make a workable jacket, save one thing: Shakedry jackets are not very durable. IOW, you don’t want to wear a pack with it, the pack straps will rub through the material. But if you’re not carrying a pack, and just going on a bike ride or a run, this is by far the best jacket I’ve ever owned, and I’ll cry real tears when it dies. Hopefully there will be workable alternatives by then.

[jameslk]

> Hopefully there will be workable alternatives by then.

I think Columbia’s OutDry Extreme tech is essentially the same thing with the membrane on the outside, which they claim is toughened to withstand abrasion, so maybe holds up better than ShakeDry:

https://www.columbia.com/meet-outdry-extreme.html

I haven’t tried it myself but I found it while researching this topic recently

[justinator]

You are correct re: Shakedry. What's interesting to me is that it used the now discontinued ePTFE which manufacturing used PFAS in production, but there is still no alternative PFAS-free Shakedry, despite now having an advantage of not requiring a DWR at all.

I would agree that even with the delicateness of Shakedry, or Shakedry-like product, there would still a use case and market.