Blaze a new trail outdoors with Dyneema® Composite Fabric

The great outdoors is more popular than ever. With more people seeking fresh air and opportunities for social distancing, camping trips have become an increasingly attractive holiday choice in recent years. In the USA alone, 2021 saw 9.1 million people set up camp for the first time – and the growth of the industry shows no signs of slowing down.

But providing your own shelter comes with age-old challenges. No hiker wants to carry more weight than necessary, and their equipment needs to withstand whatever the elements throw at it. To ensure your tent, backpack, or other gear is up to the job, you need a high-performance material – like Dyneema® Composite Fabric, made from the world’s strongest fiber™.

Using Dyneema® Composite Fabric means rough ground is less likely to rip or damage the tent, but accidents still happen. Silicon-coated fabrics often need specialized repairs that are hard to do in the field, but with Dyneema® Composite Fabric there’s no need to worry: tears can be easily repaired in minutes with our reinforced pressure-sensitive tape. That’s a major reassurance for hikers in extreme conditions, where easy repairs are a necessity rather than a luxury.

Anyone who’s spent the night in a leaky tent will know that bad weather conditions will quickly find any weaknesses in your tent’s defenses. Thankfully, the polyester surface films of Dyneema® Composite Fabric make it intrinsically water resistant. In fact, it exceeds the limits of most hydrostatic test machines, achieving up to 20,000 mm H₂O water resistance (the pressure equal to a 20-meter-high water column!). For comparison, many silicon-coated woven fabrics reach just 3,000–5,000 mm H₂O.

What’s more, Dyneema® Composite Fabrics’ very stiff fibers prevent any sagging or stretching, and with no water absorbance – unlike nylon – our fabric stays light even after a heavy downpour. Whether there’s rain in the air or on the ground, a tent made with Dyneema® Composite Fabric keeps you not only dry, but also safe in the knowledge that when you pack up and move on, you won’t be carrying the rain with you.

Despite these water-resistant credentials, Dyneema® Composite Fabric tent fabrics don’t use the fluorinated chemicals often used in water-repellant coatings. They’re also free of dangerous fire-retardant chemicals, while still meeting all required safety standards.

How do we manage this? Because the properties of Dyneema® Composite Fabric make these added chemicals unnecessary – and that’s a big deal, because such chemicals can cause harm when find their way into the environment.

In fact, reducing our environmental impact is a commitment we take very seriously. That’s why, in 2020, we decided to use Dyneema® fiber from bio-circular feedstock in all our Dyneema® Composite Fabric products. After all, anyone who enjoys escaping to the great outdoors will probably value sustainability as much as we do – so we’re proud to enable our customers to provide campers with high-performance tents that don’t leave a mark on nature.