ARTILECT Pushes Other Outdoor Brands to Go PFAS-Free

Boulder-based outdoor apparel brand ARTILECT is ahead of the crowd in creating products free of PFAS, the human-made chemicals that are often called "forever chemicals" because they don't break down over time; they've also been shown to be harmful to human health.

“We’re performance-driven,” says ARTILECT founder Trent Bush. “Performance for people, performance for the planet, equal parts. PFAS has come up recently. We were doing it anyway, but it's just become this big monster now, and it just so happens that the attention on what we're doing has been shifted a little bit from the human performance side to the PFAS.”

ARTILECT’s office is on Pearl Street in Boulder. Because of the presence there of so many outdoor brands that use PFAS in their products, “it's probably now one of the more toxic streets in the country," Bush jokes.

He doesn’t blame those brands for using PFAS, though: One type of PFAS, PTFE, are the industry standard for making water-resistant membranes for clothes. But when he founded ARTILECT in 2020, Bush wanted to develop a better-performing water-resistant material, and he knew he wanted to do it without using PFAS.

“Nobody wants to be alarmist, but I think the actual detrimental effects of PFAS on the environment aren't even out there. We'll be finding out more,” he says. “It's in everybody's best interest to try to avoid as much as they possibly can.”

REI has already gotten in on the action, announcing that it won’t sell cookware, backpacks or footwear with PFAS starting in fall 2024 and will eliminate PFAS from all of its products, including clothing, by 2026.

Colorado has passed a law that requires elimination of PFAS from various products, starting with carpets and rugs, fabric treatments, food packaging, juvenile products, and oil and gas products, by 2024. The Environmental Protection Agency is involved, too. In October 2021, it launched its PFAS Strategic Roadmap to research, restrict and remediate PFAS, a project that will go through 2024. Currently, the EPA is sampling water in each state to determine how pervasive the chemicals are.

“This summer, the region will begin sampling wastewater at selected sites located on tribal reservations to identify the presence of PFAS there,” EPA Region 8 Administrator and former Colorado legislator KC Becker shared at a public forum on March 8. “This multi-year study will provide both EPA and tribal communities with a better understanding of human health and ecosystem risks.”

Darcy O'Connor, director of the water division for EPA Region 8, said that the PFAS roadmap officially designates PFAS as a hazardous substance federally, and helps support states in their efforts to decrease the amount of PFAS with which people come in contact. “We've released drinking water health advisories for PFAS,” she noted. “We've proactively used enforcement tools to better identify and address PFAS releases. We've released a set of PFAS analytical tools to publicly shared data on PFAS and communities.”

And the EPA will continue to do more to contain PFAS contamination while “getting upstream” of the problem by making sure fewer PFAS are introduced into the world, the EPA officials added.

While Bush isn’t surprised that governments are taking action on the chemicals, he admits that he thought Europe would ban PFAS before the United States did. Now, with California, New York, Pennsylvania and Maine joining Colorado in beginning to phase out PFAS, it looks like the trend is catching on in this country.

“Who's gonna want to be the last person selling and wearing PFAS-containing apparel?” Bush asks. “I don't want to be the last guy.”

He won't be. Bush got a headstart on going PFAS-free with ARTILECT by calling on others he knows in the outdoors industry to develop a product that's next-level for both the environment and performance. Bush has worked with many top brands — from Gore-Tex to Burton Snowboards, Oakley, Fjällräven and Mountain Hardware — and most recently was vice president of apparel for backcountry climbing brand Black Diamond. “The outdoor industry has been so stagnant for so many years,” he notes.

The challenge is that the qualities that make PFAS so dangerous — its resistance to water and not breaking down over time — are what make it so good for outdoor apparel. “It's the best while being the worst,” Bush says.

ARTILECT is working to be better. Its membrane performs at a high standard for both breathability and water resistance. Instead of using PFAS, which are polymers, to create a water-resistant coating, ARTILECT found a way to make a permanent coating out of monomers.

“That PTFE membrane — my dad was working with that in the ’70s with his outdoor brand,” says Bush, whose father was one of the earliest employees of Frostline apparel. "Think of anything else that’s fifty years old. Think of a phone or a car. That's the technology that the outdoor industry has been relying upon without a whole lot of true innovation along the way, so what we've done is we've just fast-forwarded to today.”

Doing so wasn't always easy. For example, heat-transferring logos onto the material proved impossible because nothing sticks to it, so the company had to find other ways to mark its products. And rolling out the technology will bump into other obstacles. Cost for consumers isn't one of those obstacles, however. ARTILECT's outdoor apparel such as jackets, pants and other layers sell at a similar prices to other high-end products in the industry.

ARTILECT worked with zipper manufacturer YKK to create a PFAS-free repairable zipper, but there isn't the infrastructure to do that on a larger scale. “We can do it because we're small,” Bush says. “If the zipper company only has two machines that make the repairable zippers, a billion-dollar brand can’t make all their zippers.”

There's also the chance that plastics with PFAS will somehow enter the manufacturing process, or even be included in the tags used to label the products in stores. “Right now the whole machine has been set up so that PFAS are an integral part of so many processes,” Bush says. “That’s going to be challenging.”

Bush notes that most projects working to eliminate PFAS, even REI's self-started push, are phased because people recognize the difficulty of transitioning away from PFAS, particularly in performance apparel.

“There’s that economic piece of it, that there has to be a transition," Bush says. "You can't just be hot and cold. The global outdoor industry would probably fall to pieces, as well as many other places — car interiors, and carpets, and all those things. It’s going to be really, really tough.”

After the years spent developing ARTILECT’s PFAS-free, high-performing membrane, Bush recognizes that other companies face big hurdles. But he thinks the effort will be worth it. After all, people buying outdoor products are usually doing so because they love nature; they wouldn’t want to do anything that might hurt it.

“When you are outdoors, you want to make sure you make the absolute best of it, and if you're cold, or wet, or hot, whatever it is, you're not going to have as good of a time,” Bush says. “The core, driving factor of ARTILECT is still that human-performance perspective, and increasing it through innovation and future technologies. Then that good, responsible citizen thing is equally as important.”