Reduce, Reuse, Refill. Our products keep waste from being created in the first place.
In recent decades, plastics recycling has become an important part of initiatives designed to protect the planet. But reducing and reusing? Less so. We’re still a culture that needs further household waste reduction, that buys many single-use, disposable products. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in 2017 more than 26 million tons of plastic made its way to landfills. And that’s not counting the estimated 8 million tons of plastic that end up in our oceans, every year.
Even plastics that go into the recycling bin can be problematic: historically the U.S. exported much of our plastic to China to be recycled. So much so, that the Chinese government refused to accept any more in 2018. So our waste is instead shipped to other Southeast Asian countries or ends up in a U.S. landfill after all.
At Infuse, we believe that the best way to handle waste is not to create it in the first place.
So we designed our products to drastically reduce single-use plastics. First, our concentrate comes in small cartridges, rather than large, pre-dilluted plastic bottles. Second, not only are our mop pads 30% larger than single-use pads, they are made of microfiber, engineered to go into the washing machine and be reused, rather than thrown away. Third, our mops are built for a long life, so they last longer.
Some hard numbers: our concentrate containers use about 70% less plastic than most other pre-diluted ready to use cleaning liquid refills. And each Infuse microfiber pad is anything but single use! It can be washed one hundred times before it should be replaced.
In short, we believe that the math is simple. Reducing household waste and reusing creates less waste. So it never needs to be recycled or thrown into landfills.
Why Reusable Cleaning Products Are Better — Let’s Recap:
- The best way to reduce the environmental impact of plastics is to reduce the creation and use of them
- Smart engineering makes it possible to use products over and over again, rather than discarding them
- Our concentrated refill system is designed to reduce the use of plastics by about 70%
- Our microfiber pads can be washed and reused 100 times before they need to be replaced.
Looking for more on how America’s recycling waste often ends up in Asian villages (and see shocking photos that show how big the problem has become), read this article published by the Yale School of Economics.