Sep 10, 2020

From Bin to Bum!

Sometimes reducing waste and making something more sustainable isn’t about not making a product in plastic at all, it’s about repurposing or recycling a single use product that is used and discarded in their millions on a daily basis. You may be surprised to know that 60 million plastic water bottles are used and discarded worldwide each and every day. That means in the two seconds it has taken to read that fact, a shocking 3,000 of them are circling a bin somewhere!! Astonishing right? This got the Close team thinking, cloth nappies go through a lot in their relatively short lifetime, approximately 250+ washes per child and contact with strongly acidic and alkaline substances (yes I’m talking about the poo and wee 😊) and they will arguably endure more than any other piece of clothing or fabric item you or your child will own. We have been making reusable nappies for many years now and there is no doubt laminated polyester is the best material for the job.

So, if they have to contain plastic to be durable enough why not choose recycled plastic. Recycled fibres are one way we can help to reduce waste and conserve natural resources, and yes recycling a PET bottle keeps it out of the landfill or, worse, the ocean, but it does much more than that alone. Recycled PET resin is a valuable manufacturing feedstock that can be reprocessed and reused over and over again. Recycling instead of sending to landfill greatly reduces the greenhouse gas and carbon emissions impact and requires less overall energy to produce the new product.

Globally 8.3 billion metric tons of virgin plastic are used and this is still rising year on year! Most of it sadly ends up as short-term disposable products that end up as trash. To put the scale of this plastic into context, this amount of plastic is 22,000 times the weight of the empire state building!

Changing our laminate to RPET has been one of our key 2020 swops for sustainability. We thought you might be interested to see how many bottles each item diverts (see below). With your help this change will mean we can divert hundreds of thousands of plastic bottles over the coming year. We also plan to make all our polyester recycled by the end of 2021. We also have some other exciting RPET products launching in spring 2021.