Hi there,
I asked a friend of mine who works for Imperial College looking at plastic and synthetic fabrics to give me the lowdown on cotton vs synthetic fabrics. This is a summary of what he told me. Obviously, this doesn't invalidate anybody's personal experience!
Firstly, he said there is definatively no such thing as either UV proof or rotproof. There are some materials which stand up to it better than others, but even PVC will go brittle with sun and age.
Secondly, the factors in how long a material takes to fail are much more dependent on quality of manufacture and the treatment it has recieved than what it is made of. This may explain some of the different experiences out there.
He says that breathable simply means that the weave is small enough to let air through but not water because of the water's surface tension. So any canvas should be breathable. He did however say that cotton is porous so the fibres will swell when rained on. For this reason he thought untreated (i.e. not Nikwaxed) cotton would be slightly more breathable in the dry but swell up and still be waterproof in the wet.
Apparently you can get away with more in terms of low quality cotton then you can low quality acrylic. If the fibres are spun too fast they get really uneven and can break really easily, compromising the strength and making it more prone to UV damage. This might not be a problem with Pennine but could potentially be so with Sunncamp.
Because cotton is porous, if it does get mildew the mould will take a real hold and be difficult to get off. On acrylic the fibres are hard and scaly and mildew should be easier to clean off. He can't think of any reason other than cosmetic why you would care about mildew marks on canvas - it's easy to kill and once dead it doesn't cause damage. He thinks that is the reason that manufacturers say you can pack acrylic away wet - the mildew still grows in the water, it just wipes off easily.
Again, he stressed that the lifetime of either material depends far more on the quality and treatment of the cloth, but when pushed, it was his opinion that high quality cotton treated well would last longer than high quality acrylic treated well, but that if they were treated badly (i.e. left in the sun for months, put away wet etc.) the acrylic would last longer.
I hope those scientific opinions help!
Charlie
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Topic: Cotton v Acrylic - advice given to me
