With the growth of the green economy in the past decade, some companies have cottoned-on to the “feel good” factor that goes with saying their bags are made from recycled materials.
While marketing teams slap high-fives and revel in another highly-profitable, customer-friendly initiative, the consumers and bag-buyers are left with an important question: who do we believe?
Should more care be taken when buying reusable bags from companies who claim they use 100% recycled materials, or bags made from 100% RPET or recycled bottles?
First, the facts: PET is the chemical substance Polyethylene terephthalate, commonly known as Polyester. Prefixing with an R means the polyester contains recycled content. The content can contain either pre-consumer (e.g. factory off cuts) or post-consumer (e.g. plastic bottles) waste.
Upon request, Dr John Schiers of Polymer Analysis in Melbourne conducted testing for Envirosax regarding the true contents of various polyester yarns made from supposedly “recycled content”. Please consider that it’s very difficult to perform a test to tell the difference between genuine RPET and cheap virgin polyester. His conclusions to the tests are as follows:
“It is not possible to determine by testing the actual recycled content of a particular item due to the additives in the fibres (e.g. dyes, lustrants and spin finishes) as they interfere with the results. This testing, along with other research we have conducted, highlights the following: It cannot be claimed that polyester items are made from a specific number of bottles unless evidence is provided on how this was calculated.”
Due to the massive demand for RPET, supply of the material from certified sources is no longer sufficient. There are now many companies in China that produce bottles for the sole purpose of recycling them immediately into so-called RPET. This is green-washing at its worst and amounts to consumer fraud.
As a result of the huge demand, manufacturer prices on certified RPET are considerably higher than that of virgin polyester. If a company claims a bag is made from 100% RPET without certification, but it’s not much more expensive than a virgin polyester bag, then common-sense suggests that the bag probably isn’t made from RPET.
The terminology regarding material composition in some so-called RPET bags is cleverly phrased so that a quick-read indicates the bags are 100% RPET. A careful reading reveals that this is not the case. Phrases such as, “Produced from 100% recycled bottles” actually means the bottles used in the material were recycled, but doesn’t actually equate to a bag composed of entirely recycled bottles.
Without certification, companies may be deceptive in what they declare to be the content of recycled polyester in their product. Currently, and to the best of our knowledge, SCS Scientific Certification Systems is the only company in the world able to accurately test recycled content in material. Without this proper certification other issues may transpire.
While Envirosax were researching companies who make RPET from 100% recycled content, they were quite often presented with fake SCS certificates and fake documentation. Certification ensures that the amount of recycled content in the product has been verified. As testing has shown, it’s not possible to differentiate between a composition of material that may be only 10% RPET and the rest virgin polyester. The significantly higher cost of producing goods made of 100% RPET compels pricing of products upwards. With this in mind, take heed when buying goods that do not display their certification – you may be paying the price of a marketing ploy rather than a greener, more environmentally friendly product.
THE ALL-NEW ENVIROSAX SCS CERTIFIED RPET FABRIC
After four years of researching RPET manufacturers, Envirosax Pty Ltd has gone into a partnership with Unifi Inc of the USA to create its own SCS certified Envirosax RPET. Envirosax RPET is a mix of 55% flat filament polyester and 45% Repreve® polyester (Unifi Inc).
The 45% Repreve® in the Envirosax RPET is made up of 100% recycled content, 80% pre-consumer and 20% post-consumer recycled polyester content (predominantly plastic bottles).
Repreve® is third party certified by Scientific Certification Systems (SCS) and Oeka-Tex, and also meets FTC guidelines for recycled products.
The Repreve® process involves converting the pre and post-consumer waste into RPET pellets rather than producing virgin PET pellets. The pellets are the core material used in creating polyester fabric. Essentially, the pellets are heated and stretched to create the filaments that are rolled into yarn and then weaved to make polyester.
The process is so unique the Discovery Channel featured it on an episode of How It’s Made.
Apart from the obvious environmental benefits of using recycled content in the material, the process of creating the fabric as compared to virgin polyester also has many ecological advantages. The method of manufacturing the polyester yarn conserves 3.34 litres of gasoline to every kilo of polyester yarn made. With approximately 25 million tonnes of polyester produced globally per annum, this figure becomes a significant amount. (NOTE: Conservation calculations are specific only to the SCS certified Repreve yarn product which Envirosax uses.)
RPET is a fantastic idea and if manufactured properly can reduce our carbon footprint significantly. However, the industry must be kept honest and companies must be held accountable for claims they make when marketing their goods.
This season enjoy your holidays while remembering to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.
Household waste increases by an average 25% over the holiday period with the majority of the refuse being food waste, Christmas trees, cards and gift wrapping.
In the US alone over 2.65 billion Christmas cards are sold each year, 28 billion pounds (12.7 billion kgs) of food is wasted and shockingly half of the paper the US consumes annually is used to wrap gifts. This results in a hefty 4 million tons of gift wrap and bags thrown in the waste.
These figures are made even more astounding when only a very small percentage is ever recycled.
Wrapping gifts in paper was created by Hallmark in early Victorian times. It was a process of the wealthy as the poor could not afford thelavish decorated paper. It originated wh en a prominant store ran out of the usual tissue paper and patterned paper was put out on the shelf in replacement. Before this time gifts were wrapped much more sustainably in material, and even perfected to an art form by the japanese.
So here are the Envirosax tips to reduce unnecessary waste this holiday season:
Put leftovers in recyclable containers, share them with family and friends or donate whole, untouched leftovers to homeless shelters. Where possible, compost leftover food scraps.
Create beautiful, reusable wrapping for your gift with an Envirosax bag, as in our video below.
From New York to Sydney and everywhere in between, people are carrying reusable bags.
Not surprisingly, large corporations and retailers have jumped on the bandwagon, offering cheap or free reusable shopping bags as a badge of being green.
Unfortunately, these cheap reusable shopping bags are often more of a marketing ploy than a great choice for the environment. To be effective in reducing waste, reusable bags must be able to be reused time and again, and therefore must be extremely durable. Polypropylene bags will decompose after exposure to UV light – below is an example of the affect UV light has on the tensile strength of a polypropylene bag when left in sunlight for 6 months.
Do not be fooled into thinking that polypropylene is an environmentally sound alternative. You may even find the term “biodegradable” on some of these bags (see below), but the standards for use of this term is that the bag must be biodegradable in a ‘commercially managed compost environment’. This unfortunately has little to do with the reality of biodegradability; in real world disposal scenarios, without the controlled conditions specified in these standards, the bags will not break down and biodegrade in a reasonable amount of time and will not decompose to organic material that can be put to use by other micro-organisms, as the term ‘biodegradable’ suggests.
Vincent Cobb (founder of reusablebags.com) recently discussed the futility of reusable bags that aren’t made to last (here). When asked if the solution is becoming a part of the problem, he didn’t hesitate a moment – “Absolutely,” he said, explaining that some are made so cheaply they fall apart after a few uses. “They are becoming more of the junk.”
A cheap non-woven polypropylene bag must be made inexpensively. The construction and material of the bag are of poor quality and they have a tendency to give way after loading them with groceries only a handful of times. Ironically, the ‘reusable’ bags themselves end up in the garbage can.
As a consumer, an additional concern is where and by whom are these bags being made? For the retail price of a “reusable bag” to be $1, the labour and distribution costs must be extremely low. At this price is it possible to ensure all employees and suppliers are treated fairly and in adherence to Fair Trade guidelines?
Using an alternative material such as polyester (which has far better tensile strength properties than polypropylene), printed with the process of sublimation, will yield a more durable bag in which the color will not fade.
Digging a little deeper reveals that many reusable bags are nothing more than another example of green-washing.
A high quality reusable bag eliminates hundreds of cheap reusable bags, and thousands of paper and plastic bags over its lifetime.
For those of you interested in economics, you might like to know that ‘one use’ plastic bags are called a ‘market failure’. This is due to the fact that their pricing does not account for external factors such as the impact of litter on wildlife, or the monetary cost to the community to clean up plastic bag pollution.
Degradable and biodegradable plastic bags have been touted as the solution to this problem by a number of prominent supermarkets. However, there is limited evidence that they make a positive difference and more evidence to the contrary! The amount of time plastic bags remain in the environment as litter is unclear but the following facts give you some idea of their possible effects.
The most common degradable bags, oxo-degradable bags, have a ‘pro-degradent’ which causes fast break down into fragments. These then remain in the environment and may take a very long time to completely degrade. The impact of these bags as litter may thus be greater than for a normal plastic bag, which generally remains as one product, not fragments.
Biodegradable plastic bags are made from a mixture of polyethene and starch products and in the right conditions, will break down into elements like carbon dioxide, water and methane. To be considered degradable, these must compost within 12 weeks and fully biodegrade within 6 months. This means they survive long enough to pose a threat to animals if littered, as they may be mistaken for food.
If biodegradable bags are littered and caught in trees, like the plastic bags in the image below, they are unlikely to be exposed to soil microorganisms which assist breakdown and so pose the same problems as regular ‘one-use’ plastic bags.
Plastic Bag Tree in NYC
There are also questions raised about whether there is any benefit of degradable plastic bags even if they are properly disposed and end up in landfill. The Australian government published a report ‘The impact of degradable plastic bags in Australia’, which found that biodegradable plastics are unlikely to degrade in landfill as the microorganisms needed to help the break down, are not found in the dry anaerobic (oxygen deprived) conditions normally found in landfill.
The same report concluded that reusable bags have a lower environmental impact and gave better overall performance than either conventional or degradable ‘one-use’ bags, regardless of the degradability.
So the message is clear – reuse is the better option for the environment.
Trees are the lifeline of the earth, yet we continue to cut them down for unnecessary convenience such as ‘one use’ paper grocery bags. In the USA alone, 14 million trees are are cut down every year to support this market.
For each tree we cut down, we rob the earth of its positive contribution towards to reducing climate change. On average each tree absorbs 20kg of carbon dioxide per year, removes other pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide at the rate of 1kg per year and adds about 52kg of oxygen to the atmosphere per year. There is also an eco system of flora & fauna that trees protect along with preserving top soil and soil integrity.
Envirosax’s founders have in the past, rejuvenated a 17 acre property back to its former natural beauty in Northern NSW. They now live a sustainable lifestyle on a 10 acre pristine rainforest property in Currumbin, where planting has continued to preserve the area.
The property features a forest of over fifteen hundred, fifteen-year-old Hoop Pine trees, each absorbing 44lbs of carbon dioxide per year. These and the 5,000+ other trees on the property, significantly reduce the company’s carbon footprint.
With so much media attention given to one-use plastic bags and their negative effect on the environment, shoppers often assume that paper bags are a better, more sustainable choice for carrying their groceries.
However, with a bit of research it soon becomes clear that the argument is by no means as simple as paper or plastic.
For the number of ‘one use’ bags used in the USA each year it takes:
Paper -
14 million trees to make the paper bags
The production of paper bags creates 70 percent more air pollution than plastic
Plastic -
2 million barrels of oil are used to make the plastic bags
plastic bags create four times the solid waste.
* read here for more facts on plastic and paper bags
What you do with single-use bags when you are done with them and where you live, are important factors when making the choice between paper or plastic, says Jenny Powers of the Natural Resources Defense Council For example, if you live near the coast or on waterways, paper may be a more suitable choice as plastic bags clog up waterways and are damaging to marine wildlife (remember whitey the crocodile?)
(plastic bags smother coral polyps)
While paper may break down more quickly than plastic, there are still many less than desirable consequences of the paper bag. The only real solution for the environment is reusable bags!
For those of you, who, like me, are not that clear on what a hydrogen fuel cell is, it’s basically a process whereby hydrogen and oxygen combine to create a current of electricity, where the only by-product is water vapour. Clearly this is much more desirable than the polluting carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide which are released from petrol run vehicles.
With the growing concern for the environment and the high price of petrol, hydrogen fuel cells have finally been brought into the limelight.
A hydrogen fuel cell Chevrolet Equinox car was presented at the Detroit Auto show in early January this year, signaling the start of a genuine move to more energy efficient vehicles. While Honda and Toyota have been working on fuel cells for commercial use for years, with Honda developing 200 hydrogen cars for commercial sales in 2008, it has taken the rising petrol prices and an economic crisis for US car companies to realise that fuel cells are the way forward, however, the hydrogen infrastructure needed and the high cost of the cars ($100,000) means that the hydrogen-powered future for cars is not within immediate reach.
Check out this fantastic video of the ENV hydrogen-powered motor bike, which has been developed at a cost of only $6000. At this price these could be seen on the road in the next two years, if only more places follow California’s lead and invest in the hydrogen filling stations needed.
While car companies argue about the economic value of producing hydrogen fuel cells, a Queensland school has been leading the way in developing them.
Our first Guest writer, Dr Antoine Durandet, the head of science at All Saints Anglican school, Australia, explains why they started working on them, and what the students did.
“In the last couple of years we have introduced hydrogen fuel cells as a context to teach science in senior high school. Our main drive is to introduce concepts that expand our students’ understanding and appreciation of a sustainable future, while teaching the core subjects.
I have a background is plasma physics and spent 15 years in research laboratories as an experimental physicist before becoming a teacher ( by the way the best job i ever had!), so I am constantly looking for new challenges and projects for our students. Our biggest project was in 2007, when a team of students constructed a speed boat (scale model), powered by a 100w hydrogen fuel cell. The boat was presented at the Solar Boat Challenge on the Gold Coast.
In 2008, a group of 4 students from All Saints attended the students forum at the 17th World Hydrogen Economy Conference (WHEC 08, Brisbane Australia, March 08 Together with other teams from Australia, New Zealand and USA, they investigated the properties of Hydrogen Fuel cells. No doubt these guys will be our experts in 2009!
All Saints is a leading school in sustainability and especially in hydrogen fuel cell, as a result our students have hands on experiences with this state of the art technology. If you have any interest in this technology, please contact us.”
The British Labour party under Tony Blair believed that educating future generations was the key to a successful country and sustainable world – and Envirosax agrees.
‘One use’ plastic bags are going to be a continuing problem in the future unless people are taught about the problems and given an alternative. In recent weeks, I have seen the benefits of Envirosax’s efforts to create awareness and provide an alternative.
The above photo is of a school charity event in Singapore to raise much needed awareness about plastic bags. Having lived in Singapore, I know all too well that they are behind on all things green and one use plastic bags are still a major problem there. (Forget your groceries, Singporeans love plastic bags so much you can buy your iced coffee in them!)
As the world’s largest consumer, China uses nearly 3 billion plastic shopping bags a day; or at least they did until recently. The Chinese government announced earlier this year that they were banning plastic bag use in all shops and any that were used must be purchased. This policy came in to effect on 1st June and has been praised by environmental groups and other governments for its success. However, continued education is also needed, so that children understand the ban and the importance of reusable bags to protect their environment and reduce pollution.
Finally to Perth, Australia, where I received this fantastic story:
“I take my, almost 3 year old, grandaughter to the markets fairly often and she loves to hang my bag around her neck to be “the shopping lady” and get the fruit and veg. Last week as we were walking from the car she stopped, looked up at me, patted the bag and said “Tiny, I want a bag just like this for my birthday!”
Later her mother said it is the first time she has indicated she knows you can ask for things for your birthday … and what does she want – an ENVIROSAX of course.”
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently proposed a plastic bag tax in an effort to generate income and change the behavior of city residents.
Bloomberg’s idea is to implement a 6-cent fee on each bag, a penny of which would go to merchants as an incentive to keep track of the fees collected. It’s estimated that New Yorkers use 1 billion bags per year, and that the tax would bring in $16 billion for the city.
Like many cities across the country, the Big Apple is cash-strapped, and this is just one of the ways that Mayor Bloomberg proposes that his city close the budget gap it faces.
But city residents, not just its government, are also in economic distress. In a New York Daily News online poll, 53 percent of respondents thought that the plastic bag tax was a bad idea because “times are hard enough.” On the other hand, another poll on the same website reveals that 56 percent of respondents thought that the additional tax was enough to make them change their behavior.
If these polls generally reflect the opinions of New Yorkers, then the plastic bag tax would accomplish the behavioral change that the Mayor seeks.
“That’s like having a cigarette tax,” argued the mayor. ”The most wonderful thing in the world would be if we collected nothing from our cigarette tax. Think about how many people’s lives you’d save.”
San Francisco and Oakland, CA were the first and second cities to ban “urban tumbleweed,” and earlier this year, Los Angeles also followed suit with a law to take effect in 2010.
“This is a major moment for our city, to bite the bullet and go with something that is more ecologically sensitive than what we’ve ever done before,” said Los Angeles Councilman Bill Rosendahl, according to a story in the July 23rd Los Angeles Times.
Many other cities have considered similar legislation, which in numerous cases, has been voted down by local councils. However, other municipalities like Portland, Seattle, and Phoenix are attempting to take action against the single-use plastic, and have serious legislation with strong support in the pipeline.
Commendations to these progressive city leaders who have fought for their cities to make a move in the right direction.
Hopefully, New York City’s leaders will be bold in passing the tax proposal. If the largest city in the country, and the second largest in the world, took this major step in legislating more eco-friendly lifestyles and the use of reusable shopping bags, they would be setting a shining example for the rest of the world.
This is a guest blog post from a friend of the Envirosax team who is currently backpacking around Australia. Having never lived in a coastal environment before, her perspective on a problem us coast-dwellers are sometimes complacent about is a refreshing wake-up call.
Traveling around the East coast of Australia I’ve been hearing stories from scuba divers, aquarium workers and locals on the beaches, about the growing problem of plastic bags on marine habitats. The most common story is of turtles dying after swallowing plastic bags they have mistaken for jellyfish. However this is hard to comprehend when there is limited coverage on the exact effects of disposable plastic bags on wildlife. Or so I thought, until last weekend when I read in the local news that a 3.5m crocodile died of starvation after swallowing 25 plastic shopping and garbage bags, a plastic wine cooler and a rubber float. The build up of plastic in his stomach prevented him from digesting food and led to his death in captivity on Sunday, after being taken in by authorities the previous day. What a horrible way to go.
After reading this I did a bit more research in to the actual numbers of wildlife deaths from plastic, and found that the Australian Seabird Rescue estimate that there are about 100,000 animals killed by plastic each year… so apparently our crocodile Whitey, as he was named, is far from the only casualty.
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority said Whitey’s death “reinforces our general view that the amount of marine debris in the ocean is too much and it’s damaging wildlife.”
Spending even a small amount of time researching the dangers of plastic bags turns up a frightening amount of information, but one that made the most impact on me was this documentary from Vice Magazine about the colossal amount of plastic waste (larger than Texas apparently!) now collecting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean:
