Why We Use 100% Recycled Plastic

Packaging is a constant series of tradeoffs. Environmental tradeoffs. Carbon impact. Safe shipping. No packaging is perfect with 0% environmental impact. 

We’ve recently made the switch from glass to 100% recycled plastic for our body butters. While it might seem counterintuitive, we believe this choice is better for the environment.

So what are the factors that go into making this choice:

1. Safety: Broken glass can be a real safety concern, especially in the bathroom. It’s one room in the house where you’re (almost) always barefoot. If you drop a glass jar you have to worry about tiny shards of glass on your bathroom floor. That’s not something anyone wants getting out of the shower. 
2. Carbon impact in production: Making glass is hugely carbon intensive. It’s not something most people think about when thinking about sustainability. Producing glass requires huge amounts of heat and most of that heat is produced by burning fossil fuels. Virgin glass uses 8-10x as much CO2 than the equivalent virgin plastic jar. 
3. Glass uses diminishing resources: Glass is made of sand. Huge amounts of sand are needed to make glass. And mining of that sand can have negative environmental impacts. It can also have some pretty terrible human impacts. According to a recent BBC article, extended exposure to silica dust can cause silicosis. Acute silicosis is irreversible and may result in respiratory failure. 
4. Transportation impact: Most glass jars are coming from overseas. At weights 10-20x higher than glass, that has a huge impact on fossil fuel burned for transportation. 
5. Impact of Recycled Content: The figures above are based on virgin or new plastic. Our jars use 100% recycled plastic. That reduces the environmental impact by almost 50% compared to virgin plastic. And by recycling the jars again, you can help us to reduce that impact even further.
6. Recycling: We have a recycling problem in United States. Most of what we use, single use or not, doesn't get recycled. And what does get thrown in the recycling bin, often doesn't get recycled as most of our recycling is single stream. Food and other contaminants prevent much of what goes in the recycling from actually being reused. So on our end, starting with a 100% recycled product makes the most sense.

All together, the evidence for 100% recycled packaging demonstrates the fewest tradeoffs. While using glass over plastic may inherently feel better, when comparing glass to 100% recycled plastic, the answer is obvious. Until the packaging industry catches up with biodegradable options, we’ll be using packaging that has the lowest possible carbon footprint.

Do you have questions about any of our products, packaging, ingredients or otherwise?

Send us an email at  help@organicbath.co and we’ll get right back to you. Thanks for reading!