For our small (but capable) 4-person team, preserving our environment is a top priority. Here’s a little-known factoid about the Whiskers team: 3 of us grew up on the same street, one block from the ocean in sunny South Florida. This lifelong connection to the ocean has made one thing painfully obvious for all of us: we need to figure out this whole “garbage” thing. The amount of plastic in the ocean is nothing short of a travesty of our own creation – and a completely avoidable one at that.
We recently made some changes to our production process and partners, and we knew this would be the perfect opportunity to start doing our part in becoming a more sustainable business that can have a positive impact on the environment around us.
Our new production partners in North Carolina developed a clever and effective solution to this problem we want to contribute to solving. Our dress and golf laces are made of a polyester/nylon weave. Let’s get scientific real quick: polyester is a synthetic polymer, with a lot of the same stuff that goes into normal plastic goods. With polyester in everything from the t-shirt you’re wearing right now to industrial conveyor belts, polyester is the third-most produced plastic material made on planet earth.
So here’s where our solution comes in: since polyester is made of most of the same stuff that a plastic water bottle is made of, technically, you could make polyester out of recycled plastic bottles. So we did. And now, every lace that ends up on our spools is preventing plastic from reaching our oceans and landfills – plastic water bottles to be more specific. These plastic bottles make up a huge portion of the pollutants in the ocean and repurposing them is an important step towards a cleaner ocean.
So, turtle lovers rejoice! From now on, every time you fill your boring shoe holes, you can feel all warm and fuzzy inside knowing that those tasty little threads are taking plastic out of the ocean – one shoe hole at a time – with polyester made entirely from recycled plastic bottles. Right here in the U.S. of A.
Look for more info on our new production process and sustainability efforts to come! We’re pretty freakin’ proud of it. Oh, and please recycle our lace boxes when you’re done with them! We’ve all got to do our part to make a difference.
