ethical. sustainable.
locally-made.
… but not plastic free
As the number of plastic-free businesses and lifestyles continue to skyrocket, you might ask yourself why we’re selling plastic products. But the beauty of these objects is that they are made of plastic that would otherwise be considered waste.
All our products are handmade in our recycled plastic foundry; with local community projects and businesses collecting or contributing their plastic waste in order to save it from the landfill.
Usually, you think of plastic manufacturing as “made in China”, but everything - from sorting to cleaning to shredding to injecting - is done in their workshop here in the U.K. Providing locals work, opportunities for university students, and community engagement events. They plan to develop an entirely closed loop system with transparent information of the product’s lifecycle - from initial waste plastic, to final product we sell, and then back into the system if you return it to us.
But don’t worry, no single-use plastics here! All orders will be shipped with recyclable packaging. In some cases we’ve used recycled components to reduce our environmental impact - because even cardboard requires high amounts of energy to produce.
Using waste as a resource is how we’re hoping to positively contribute to reducing plastic’s effect on our planet.
Greenwashing and missdirection
Remember learning ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’?
Why is it that we focus the most on recycle, when it’s the end of the line?
When thinking about reducing our impact, the best option is always reducing resource consumption. Then, making a point to reuse items over and over again, rather than continuously needing to buy new, should be our next priority. And it is finally recycling that comes last, once we’ve used items to the point that they are no longer useful.
Focusing on recycle has reduced the little green symbol to an easy way for businesses to say “it’s ok to buy more, you can feel good about throwing it away”.
In actuality, only 9% of all plastic products and packaging ever made has been recycled. 270 million tonnes of NEW plastic is produced yearly and 275 million tonnes becomes waste. Of that, 8 million metric tonnes ends up ‘leaked’ into our oceans YEARLY. Plastic in landfills leech toxins into our soil and water systems and greenhouse gasses into the air. And plastic takes nearly forever to decompose. It might break into smaller and smaller pieces, but that results in microplastics entering our water and food systems.
Meanwhile, we know that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. But we’re over here trying to sort our kerbside recycling hoping it will end up in the right place. When big corporations aren’t even reducing the amount of plastic they use in packaging. Those companies use smart marketing and diversion tactics to make sure we feel the weight and remind us to keep recycling!
But transparent businesses that work to reduce waste, reduce plastic consumption, and ultimately reduce fossil fuel extraction can provide another option. And enough interest and investment in these alternative methods will allow us to change the face of the industry.
We want to be one of those businesses that makes a real difference to the system. So we’ll be continuously reviewing our processes, materials, vendor relationships and practices to make sure that we feel good about what we’re putting out in the world. This is your invitation to join us. Let’s create something new and exciting together!
Systemic change
Every region handles recycling in different ways. You might move from one post code to another and have to learn a whole new recycling process. That should be indication enough there is a problem. What your local council collects and how waste is handled - from recycling, to landfill, to incineration - isn’t even uniform across a county. And reports coming from waste management sources point to disconnection between what we’re told and what is actually happening.
Remember 2018, when China enacted the ‘National Sword’ policy, banning the import of plastic and other materials to be sent to their nation’s recycling processors? China had single-handedly processed nearly HALF of the world’s recycleable waste for 25 years.
Globally more plastics are now ending up in landfills, incinerators, or likely littering the environment as rising costs to haul away recyclable materials increasingly render the practice unprofitable. In England, more than half-a-million more tons of plastics and other household garbage were burned last year.
- Cheryl Katz, 7/3/19
Equally vexing, recycled plastic has little value, partially because virgin plastic is such a cheap commodity. We need to change what we value - seeing waste as an opportunity to solve a problem - rather than a dirty word.
Rather than making items from virgin plastic, we need to invest in infrastructure and waste management to change the way we collect, clean, process and produce with recycled materials. Our products capture that shift on a small scale, but a necessary first step.
