Natural Rubber Yoga Mat

Details

A mat pressed from tapped natural rubber with a polyurethane grip face. Natural rubber is the most abused phrase on a yoga shelf. A great many mats sold under it are PVC, which is cheap, heavy per rupee and lasts a century in a landfill, or TPE, a thermoplastic foam that is lighter and fine and simply is not rubber. Neither is distinguishable by hand once embossed and neither will admit it on the label, so the only settlement is instrumental: FTIR on a section identifies polyisoprene against polyvinyl chloride against a styrene block copolymer in about ten minutes, and we run it on every lot. And here is the part we will not round off. This mat is not natural rubber all the way to the surface. The base is rubber and the face you put your hands on is a 0.3 millimetre polyurethane layer. It is there because raw rubber goes slick as soon as it is wet, and polyurethane does the opposite, gripping harder as your hands and the mat get damp, which is the whole problem a yoga mat exists to solve. Calling the mat natural rubber full stop would be tidier and it would also be the exact cheat this page opens by naming, so both materials are printed and so is the thickness of each. The rubber is lightly foamed. Solid natural rubber is about 0.95 grams per cubic centimetre and this sheet is 0.57, which is why a 4 mm mat weighs 2.7 kg rather than four and a half.

• Base is tapped natural rubber, identified by FTIR, not PVC and not TPE
• Grip face is a declared 0.3 mm polyurethane layer, closed cell, not a coating on nothing
• No foam filler core, no bonded second rubber layer to peel at the edge
• Phthalates by GC-MS and heavy metals by the EN 71-3 migration method, both per lot
• Extractable latex protein measured by ASTM D5712, because this is real latex
• 183 x 61 cm, the standard mat footprint, with a cotton webbing carry strap
• Sheet density 0.57 g per cubic centimetre, printed so the weights below can be checked
• No PVC, no TPE, no filler, no bonded layers
• It smells of rubber for one to two weeks. Unroll it somewhere shaded and airy and it goes. It will not go in the sun, and sunlight also breaks down polyisoprene, so never dry it there.
• It contains natural rubber latex. If you react to latex, this is not your mat.