Marcel finds it important not only to find the best, plant-based ingredients that are good for your home, skin and the environment. He also believes it is important that the packaging of his products does not harm the planet. That is why all Marcel’s Green Soap bottles are made from 100% recycled plastic. And we are quite proud of that.
100% recycled bottles are made from collected plastic. The collected plastic goes through a complicated process before it becomes a new bottle:
-
The waste is sorted and separated into different categories.
-
The separated plastic is reduced to pieces of 5 to 10 cm, also known as 'shred'.
-
Grinders grind the shred into even finer flakes. The flakes are then washed with cold water, dried then washed with warm water and finally washed with cold water again.
-
The flakes are melted and filtered to remove impurities, after which it is chopped into granules in a kind of meat grinder.
-
And there is the result: a recycled raw material with comparable properties to new plastic for reuse in the plastic chain.
Special, right? That is why it is so important that we all continue to separate and recycle plastic. We really don't need new plastic anymore. There's more than enough on the planet already! This is also apparent from 2 new studies by an international team of scientists: “Global plastic production is growing faster than what the world can collect in plastic waste. Reducing this flow of plastic waste could only be successful if the strongly increasing production of newly manufactured plastic is slowed down.”
And that existing amount of plastic waste on the planet? This can be reduced using existing technologies. “This includes collecting and recycling the waste, redesigning products to eliminate the use of non-recyclable plastics, expanding options for refills and in some cases replacing existing materials. But solutions like recycling (currently only 12% of all plastic is reused) should be expanded enormously.”
Our global Plastic Use
The amount of plastic produced worldwide every year has exploded: from 2 million tonnes in 1950 to 368 million tonnes in 2019. These are the figures from the plastic industry itself, but not all synthetic fibres are included, so the actual production is much bigger. More than half of all plastic produced in total was not put on the market until after the year 2000. And production is expected to increase even further to about 600 million tonnes in 2025. Let that sink in!
In total, an estimated 9.2 billion tonnes of plastic has been produced since the 1950s (until 2017). Just over a quarter of this is still in use and only 600 million tonnes have been recycled. And did you know that about 40% of all plastic products are thrown away within a month? Think of packaging material, such as the plastic bottles from cleaning products and soap. It’s a real shame, of course. That is why Marcel opts for 100% recycled bottles. These are made from old plastic packaging. For example, we collect more plastic than we use, reducing the global plastic waste. Provided we collect and recycle our plastic properly, of course. And you can help too! Are you in?