Over the last several years a new trend is developing in the big-box retailers across the country: floor-ready garments shipped directly from the manufacturer to the clothing retailer stores. These garments are pre-hung and pre-ticketed before shipping so that all the individual store has to do is to open the box and hang up the garment.
But this convenience comes at a huge cost. With this new supply trend municipal landfills are receiving millions more hangers than in years past.1 Add on top of that the expected lifespan of most hangers on display: sometimes 2-3 months, often just weeks or days. The result is an environmental catastrophe.
Plastic and wire hangers have become so commonplace in the retail environment that they have become virtually invisible. That is until it’s time to dispose of them. Municipal recyclers won’t and can’t take them. Made of 7 different types of low-grade plastic (if marked at all), they are extremely difficult to identify and segregate on a rapidly moving recycling line. Made from multiple materials (plastic, wire, non-slip vinyl pads, etc.) the components are costly to separate. Most of all wire hooks are notorious for jamming the lofting cams in expense recycling machinery, bringing entire recycling lines to a grinding halt.
So where do all these plastic hangers go? Every year an estimated 8-10 billion unrecyclable plastic/wire hangers end up clogging our municipal landfills, requiring over 1,000 years to break down. That's 4.6 Empire State Buildings full of plastic hangers--every year. An estimated 3.5 million wire hangers end up in landfills and can take over 100 years to decompose.
And once in landfills these billions of hangers leach dangerous chemicals into our ground water, chemicals such as Benzene ([6] PS-Polystyrene) a known carcinogen and hormone disruptor Biphenyl-A ([7] PS-Polycarbonate) into our ground water.
Groundbreaking Ditto Hangers solve these industry-wide problems by designing hangers made from the most widely recycled materials in the world: Recycled Paper and PET Plastic. By choosing these two vastly different materials we provide an alternative for both the short-term “floor-ready” system and the longer requirements of floor reused hangers.
Either way, once the product’s lifespan is at an end, it continues to become a valuable, recyclable material for many other product generations.
From dittohanger.com
1 comment:
It is amazing the things that we take for granted that are fouling up our world. I worked at an Old Navy store over the holidays one year and saw first hand the hundreds of hangers being shipped in every day. I knew that they would eventually either end up in the dumpster behind the store or the trash at the customers home.
Post a Comment