From Crude Oil to Fleece: Winter Camping Gear

The Gear Check

1The outdoor club at Pinecrest Middle School is planning a one-night winter camping trip at a state park, where nights often drop below −5 °C. At the gear check, club leader Ms. Okafor asked the students to trace where each item comes from. Some gear is made of natural materials, which come from plants or animals and are cleaned, spun or woven without changing what substance they are. A wool hat comes from sheep's fleece, cotton socks come from the cotton plant, and the down filling in some sleeping bags is made of soft duck or goose feathers.

2Other gear is made of synthetic materials. People make these through chemical processes that turn natural resources into new substances that are not found in nature. Polyester fleece and nylon tents are two examples. Both usually start as crude oil or natural gas pumped from underground. At a chemical plant, small molecules made from these resources react and join into very long chains called polymers. The polymer is melted and pushed through tiny holes to form threads, which are spun and knitted or woven into fabric. Some fleece is made from used plastic bottles, which are made of the same kind of polyester, so the bottles are melted and turned into new threads.

3Other camping items come from natural resources too. The glass in a lantern cover is made mostly from sand that is heated with other minerals until it melts and forms a new material. Aluminum cook pots come from bauxite, an ore dug from the ground. Even the pain reliever in the first-aid kit has a story: medicines related to aspirin were first made from a substance found in willow bark, but today aspirin is made in factories from chemicals that come from crude oil.

4Synthetic materials affect society in many ways. Fleece is light, dries quickly and often costs less than a down jacket. However, crude oil and natural gas are nonrenewable resources, and washing fleece can release tiny plastic fibers that may end up in rivers and oceans.

5To decide what to pack, the club tested how well three fabrics keep things warm when dry and when wet. They wrapped identical glass jars in two layers of each fabric. An adult filled each jar with 300 mL of water at 60 °C, and the students recorded the water temperature after 30 minutes in a garage where the air was 5 °C. For the wet trials, each fabric was soaked in cold water and wrung out before wrapping. One jar was left unwrapped for comparison.