Rescue birds by supporting Patagonia Traceable Down Collection!

Patagonia Traceable Down

Patagonia is the world’s first brand to be certified to both the Responsible Wool Standard and the Traceable Down Standard.

Patagonia Traceable Down is traced from parent farm to apparel factory to help ensure that the birds that supply it are protected by the strongest animal welfare and consumer assurance standards. These include robust requirements in all areas of the birds’ lives, and especially protects against force-feeding and live-plucking.

We began working in 2007 to trace our down supply chain in the interest of sound animal welfare. Since fall 2014, all of the virgin down we use to insulate our products has met our own Patagonia Traceable Down Standard. In our Fall 2017 product season, we went a step further and announced that all our virgin down was also certified to the Global Traceable Down Standard (Global TDS), Advanced certification level by NSF International.

In 2018, Patagonia went even further and achieved certification at the brand level, becoming the first outdoor brand to be certified to the Advanced Global Traceable Down Standard. This added level of certification covers our internal product traceability systems as well as our distribution center. This allows certification of not only the down material in our products but the full final product itself.

How and why do we do this?

Our tracing process starts by auditing the parent farms, where birds are raised to produce eggs. This is where the highest risk for live-plucking occurs, as animals live there up to four years. Even though we don’t get our down from birds at parent farms, we feel obliged to look out for their welfare as they are an essential part of the down supply chain. This is what sets us apart from other brands also concerned about animal welfare.

The eggs produced at parent farms are transferred to other farms, where hatchlings are raised for their meat. We audit these farms to ensure sound animal welfare practices. Down is a byproduct of the food industry, and the down we buy comes exclusively from slaughterhouses. After it is collected from geese that have been killed for their meat, we follow it through washing, sorting and processing facilities to ensure proper traceability and segregation from untraceable down. We continue our audits all the way to the garment factory, where we make sure our certified traceable down is stored separately from that of other brands, and used only in our clothing. Audits then continue to our distribution center, where the down garments arrive, are checked in, stored and packaged to send out to our customers following the Traceable Down Standard brand requirements. It’s a lot of work. But this is how we help ensure the birds whose down we use in our products have been treated humanely.

The assurance of sound animal welfare and full chain of custody inherent in the Global Traceable Down Standard is the result of thousands of hours of work from our executives, designers, material planners, sourcing department, distribution center, suppliers and corporate social responsibility team. It was neither cheap nor easy, and we had to reexamine our strategy and business operations in the process. But building a long-lasting product that helps you stay warm in good conscience is a legacy of which we are extremely

Credit: https://www.patagonia.com/traceable-down.html