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When is Polyester Greener than Bamboo?
Bamboo is often presented as a green wonder material, showing up in everything from flooring to bicycles to laptop cases; but it's important to understand that while the material itself is fast-growing and renewable, the processes needed to transform it into a finished product can negate the sustainability factor.
When outdoor gear company Patagonia needed to design a warm-water wetsuit—something more in line with the temperatures in their native SoCal than, say, the frigid Dungeons of South Africa—the green-minded company looked into bamboo to provide the fiber. But research showed that roughly half of the solvents needed in the production process would end up as waste. Then they struck upon a novel material for a wetsuit: Recycled polyester. There's plenty of the stuff, and it's a sign o' the times that we can (and should) start seeing used plastic as a valid raw materials alternative to something that grows out of the ground.
In the video below—which is filled with enough beautiful surfing shots to make you hate your job—Brett Krazniewicz, Patagonia's Technical Material Developer, explains around 1:37 why bamboo got the boot and polyester got the props:
via coolhunting
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Consumers however, are mostly stupid and fail to do their homework and are content with buying a product packaged in a molded pulp tray made in China, shipped halfway across the world, intermodal shipped to a co-packer, packed-out, then shipped to a DC, then to a retail store. The consumer will then throw out the tray instead of composting it, when we could have thermoformed them a tray locally for a fraction of the cost at a local plant at 10x the production speed and a fraction of tooling charges, putting Americans to work and saving all that fuel and energy to move something around the world because we're leveraging slave labor and questionable raw material sources.
The best way to reduce waste is to keep things local and reuse/recycle.