Underwear-off…

Here we go again, people… I don’t know if I’ve been living under a rock or something and this is old news to everyone, but it’s new to me. I’ve recently gotten into performance underwear. This is mainly because I’m tired of being either frozen or super-sweaty on my bike in the wintertime and I know that there must be a better way. I need something that will keep me warm and will be able to stand up to constant abuse.

Anyway, I’ve been hearing a lot about performance undergarments and it really comes down to two main recommendations, Hot Chillys and Ice Breaker. Both specialize in making clothing that will keep you warm, no matter how cold it is, and no matter what you’re up to out there. From what people were saying to me about one or the other, I thought it was going to be a toss up, but in the end it wasn’t even close!

Turns out, Ice Breaker gear is made of wool, exclusively. And not just any wool, it’s made of wool off of alpine sheep in New Zealand. Hot Chillys gear is made of, um, well, mostly plastic. I think. For me that’s enough. And it speaks to a larger issue, that being the fact that sometimes a complicated, waste-ridden, completely linear, utterly fossel-fuel dependent production process might not be considered innovation if one takes a step back and looks at the entire process as a whole (from material extraction, to production, all the way to ultimate disposal).

Yes, I’m appreciative of all the work that the fine folks of Hot Chillys (an American company, by the way) have done in advancing synthetic protection against the elements, but had they bothered to look, they would have seen that mother nature solved this problem a long, long time ago, and with far fewer petrochemicals involved. There are already animals that exist in the cold, and they do just fine without polyester. Hell, I think I remember from that Planet Earth series that scientists were having trouble locating Musk Ox with infrared cameras because their insulation was just that good. Biomimicry, people, biomimicry.

And as long as we’re comparing full life cycle of both products, I’d say that transportation pretty much zeros out being that plastic comes from oil, which comes from the middle east, and New Zealand wool has to be shipped all the way from the other side of the world. The end life of each product is kind of interesting, though. If one reads the innovations page for Hot Chillys, one sees that each product is polyester with a mix of treatments, some natural, some synthetic. How does one fully recycle that? The natural and the unnatural are completely intertwined. Now, compare that to wool, just wool; something that occurs in nature already. See where I’m going with this?