Heat storage as light as a feather – one of nature’s marvels
Goose down and duck down from humanely treated animals, without exception
VAUDE uses down in sleeping bags and clothing, offering lightweight, highly functional outdoor products with perfect thermal insulation. We only use gray duck down and white goose down from Poland, Russia and China.
Down is a marvel of nature. It forms a natural insulation layer for water birds such as geese or ducks. The colder the air, the "fluffier" and warmer the down of the birds that live there. Technically this is called loft and it is measured in cubic inches (Cuin).
| GRI: | PR6 |
| GRI: | EN1 |
To ensure that birds can fly despite their thick thermal insulation, down is also light as a feather. No other material achieves such comparably high thermal insulation at such a low weight.
Down is a natural product, a "renewable resource" and is biodegradable. It is a waste product from the food industry. This also makes it ecologically very efficient in addition to its excellent technical characteristics.
Animal welfare as a voluntary obligation
However, like any "industry" the procurement of down has its dark side. Unfortunately, both the keeping and feeding of geese and ducks does not always meet the values that correspond to our understanding of animal welfare.
VAUDE has a clear commitment: we only use the down of animals that were not force fed and killed for foei gras. We have received verification on this from of all our suppliers.
Our goal is more monitoring
Our supplier for down clothing is also a bluesign® system partner and the down used is "bluesign® approved". We discovered that we still have no absolute control over the conditions under which the animals that our down comes from are kept and treated.
Therefore, we will commission an independent organization to perform an audit of the entire supply chain of our down. We will verify each step along the way – starting with conditions at the goose and duck farms, as well as at the slaughterhouses, establishing the down’s origin without a doubt at the retailers, and thoroughly evaluating the supplier’s processing of the down.
So far, we have already been able to evaluate the supply chain back to slaughterhouses, but we want to extend the audit even further to include the goose and duck farms where the animals are raised. This will enable us to achieve complete transparency throughout our entire supply chain of down.
