The invisible cost of staying dry

Gore-Tex transformed a toxic material into an outdoor icon. Now they're being sued for it.

It’s a brand name synonymous with adventure — the waterproof, breathable membrane that revolutionised the outdoor clothing industry, letting people stay outside for longer, no matter the weather. Walk into any outdoor store and you’ll see the oversized black and gold labels everywhere, a collectively acknowledged stamp of quality with the tagline “Guaranteed to keep you dry”. First used in outerwear in 1977, Gore-Tex quickly became, and remains, an icon — the saying “there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing” comes to mind. Ask any outdoor enthusiast for their definition of “good” clothing, and the answer will probably be Gore-Tex. Unless they live in Elkton, Maryland.

Drive roughly an hour north-east of Baltimore and you’ll reach the small town, in Cecil County near the state border with Delaware. With a community of just under 16,000, Elkton has many of the things one might find in countless towns across the U.S. — a hospital, a music hall, a handful of restaurants and a Goodwill — it’s just a place that people call home. Nothing out-of-the-ordinary. Except for the fact that cancer rates in Cecil County sit high above average state and national levels. In particular, rates of lung and bronchus cancer mortality are more than 50 percent above the U.S. average. And it’s no mere coincidence.

The area surrounding Elkton is also home to 14 manufacturing sites owned by W. L. Gore & Associates, a multinational company specialising in materials derived from fluoropolymers. Better known, perhaps, as the parent company of Gore-Tex. Fluoropolymers fall into a broader category of chemicals called PFAS — shorthand for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a group of over 10,000 synthetic chemicals colloquially known as “forever chemicals”. Prized for their durability and ability to repel both water and oil, PFAS have been used widely in consumer goods since the 1940s — think non-stick pans, sellotape, carpets, paint, cleaning products, fire extinguisher foam, and waterproof clothing. They are everywhere — and they stay everywhere, too.

“Forever chemicals” is no misnomer. PFAS shed from products containing them during manufacture, use, and disposal — pervasive and highly mobile, once they enter the environment they’re transported by water and wildlife food chains, permanently polluting ecosystems from the slopes of Everest to the deepest oceans. Over a third of water courses tested in England and Wales contain medium or high-risk levels of PFAS. They bioaccumulate, building up in the bodies of humans and animals, with numerous studies linking them to health issues including liver damage, hormonal disruption, infertility and developmental defects in unborn children. Several PFAS have been directly identified as carcinogens — and 99% of us now have PFAS in our bloodstreams.

W. L. Gore has been operating in Cecil County for over 50 years — throughout this time, their facilities have leached PFAS into waterways and emitted them from smokestacks, polluting drinking water with levels up to 700 times above federal limits. Now, a class action lawsuit, brought by around 4,000 people, alleges a link between PFAS exposure and heightened levels of cancer in the community. A second lawsuit is brought by the state of Maryland over alleged environmental violations. Both claim that Gore knew about the risks posed by their products in the 1980s, but continued with business as usual. As the company grew, so did the volume of waste and pollution — even as staff began to get sick, they were told the chemicals they were working with were harmless. Today, W. L. Gore is worth almost $5 billion, and they continue to deny responsibility.

If the story sounds familiar, you’ve probably seen Dark Waters, the 2019 film based on the true story of environmental lawyer Robert Bilott and his battle with chemical giant DuPont. This is the sequel. Because Gore-Tex was never created with the aim of delivering high-performance textile waterproofing. It was invented accidentally by Bob Gore in the late 1960s, whilst he worked in his father’s Teflon factory — Teflon being the trade name of polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE. PTFE, in turn, was accidentally discovered at DuPont in 1938. Gore found that stretching Teflon caused it to fill with air pockets, and that these were 700 times larger than a water vapour molecule but 20,000 times smaller than a water droplet — steam and perspiration could pass out through the material, but no rain could get in. Breathable. Waterproof. Expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE) was introduced to the public under the brand name Gore-Tex — the result of a happy accident that became an outdoor product development dream. And an environmentally toxic nightmare.

Whilst public awareness of the health risks associated with Teflon has grown, Gore-Tex is far from falling out of fashion. The rise of gorpcore means you’ll now find Gore-Tex shells on urban streets, designer runways and outside your local pub — even when it’s not raining. Staying dry has never been so cool. There are murmurings of the harmful effects, but rarely deeper than simply stating it’s “not ideal for a material whose main purpose is to help nature lovers to explore nature”. The impact of PFAS on environmental and human health is undisputed — but where profit is involved, it’s just easier to keep one eye closed. Gore-Tex started rolling out PFAS-free products in 2023, along with a new ePE membrane that claims to be made without intentionally added per- and polyfluorinated substances — but progress is slow, and so is take up among many brands. Perhaps the only thing more pervasive than PFAS is the stigma of sustainability being a trade-off at the expense of performance. Technical outdoor clothing is the ultimate paradox — synthetic, fossil fuel-derived materials, sold as a necessity for stepping outside. An industry built on the belief that to experience nature, we must consume it.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Numerous brands including Klättermusen, Finisterre and Fjällräven have completely eliminated PFAS from their waterproofing technology (or never used them in the first place) — and all create products that perform at the highest level, in harsh conditions. After all, you don’t get to claim to make “the world’s most refined mountaineering equipment” for nothing. The belief that performance and planet are mutually exclusive is outdated — as is the idea that it’s possible to leave no trace. All adventures leave more than footprints. Everything comes at a cost — only sometimes, it’s not visible to the eye. In the case of Gore-Tex, that cost has never been higher. Are we really willing to trade so much, just to spend a little longer in the rain?