Embracing Circularity: It’s Easier Than You Might Think

As Earth Month comes to a close, we wanted to highlight an example of actuating sustainability practices for everyday business. Who better to speak on this than Adrian Solgaard , the founder of Solgaard and a champion of circularity:

There's a new mountain range in the Atacama Desert that goes as far as the eye can see. The ocean floor is reshaping in ways our sea creatures could never have imagined.? This version of “terraforming,” however, isn’t what mother nature intended.? These vast new land masses are made entirely of plastic.

Plastic was an amazing invention - it is the reason that our modern healthcare, food storage and more, are safe.? The cost to our planet, however, has been devastating.? As a society, we have prescribed no value to that cost. 75% of plastic ever produced has become waste. There's over 2,000 pounds of plastic per person that exists in this world.? Our planet has no more room to store this waste - we have to start viewing plastic as a limited resource, as a raw material in itself.? Aluminum already provides a great example of how society acts when they know a resource is limited.? 85% of aluminum ever made since the 1800s is still in use today.??

What if we took the same approach to plastic?? Good News: we already are and can continue to do so at an immense scale.? Circularity has been discussed as a far off, far future thing, but the solution is actually available today.? Take backpacks.? Typically, a backpack's made from dozens of materials: polyethylene, polyurethanes, EVA foams, Nylons, ABS and more. At the last two TED conferences, Solgaard has provided conference-goers with 100% mono material backpacks.? They are exclusively made from PET, which means that at the end of their useful lives, they can be thrown into a recycling machine and mechanically recycled as easily as a plastic water bottle.? Our products have won a Red Dot Design Award and been recognized as a Time Magazine Best Invention showing we don’t have to sacrifice quality, function or aesthetics to achieve this.??

Along the way we have pulled over 1 Million Tons of plastic from oceans, rivers and mangroves in Asia. ? We are just getting started and as a society, we can demand this level of circularity from our preferred consumer brands.? For those that say it is too costly, we have done this with less than $3 million of total funding for our business, while supporting non-profit activities to clean-up the ecosystems that we operate in.? The time to act is now and possibilities are endless.??