The Power of Recycled Plastics: The Recycled Folding Container

People that love the outdoors tend to have another thing on their mind often, sustainability. Going outside can be a difficult thing to do when it requires buying all new gear and not only forking over all of that money, but also adding to the production of more and more material goods. 

Plastic is one of those materials that is highly versatile and can be incredibly useful in a variety of different settings, but we now know the impacts of producing and using plastic. New technologies have moved us toward creating products that are made fully from recycled plastics without compromising the strength and quality of the product itself. 

Brooklyn Outdoor Company’s Recycled Folding Container is exactly that. It’s a product that’s created from fully-recycled materials, but is still just as durable as something that’s being produced and used for the first time. BOC believes that creating products like this is the key to creating a sustainable future in which we don’t need to sacrifice doing the things we love to save the planet.

Polypropylene
First created in 1954, polypropylene is one of the most popular plastics used throughout the world today. The material can be found in everything from juice bottles to the shirt you may be wearing right now. Its presence is widespread and has been both an incredible invention and an environmentally destructive discovery

Once we discovered how to create and distribute polypropylene goods, it was almost like we had nothing else to do but that. With such a high distribution, as well as a high level of impact on the environment, finding ways to recycle and reuse polypropylene needs to now be at the top of our priority list.

You can most likely find polypropylene somewhere within arms reach of you right now. It may be in your phone case, the bottle of water you’re drinking from, or the clothes that you’re wearing. If you ate yogurt this morning, that came from a polypropylene container. If you stored leftovers in a tupperware, that’s all polypropylene. Are you wearing glasses? Polypropylene. You get the idea. It’s everywhere in our world today and we continue to use it because it’s cheap and easy to make. The end result is a highly useful product that we can apply to everyday uses all around us. It’s really no wonder why humans discovered and then loved polypropylene goods.

Making polypropylene all begins with the mining of natural gasses and other raw goods. In a factory setting, plenty of plastic can be produced in a short period of time, but we are now recognizing that there is a high cost to that production. While China is the largest producer of the material, the US and other countries are nowhere close to innocent. There are still hundreds of producers across the USA, all continuing to contribute to the issue at hand.

The beginning of the process for creating polypropylene is all about harvesting raw goods to run through production. Petroleum, natural gas, and a huge volume of water are all required to produce plastic. On average, it takes 22 gallons of freshwater to produce a single pound of plastic. Add this all up, and the entire industry is sucking the country dry. 

Larger mining methods like fracking for natural gasses have been at the forefront of environmental activism for decades, and for good reasons. These processes are incredibly destructive to the environment both in and around where the raw goods are being mined from. 

With all of these different issues, just getting all of the materials necessary to produce polypropylene already has a huge footprint of environmental degradation. 

During the process of producing polypropylene, there is a massive amount of energy that’s used in order to provide the heat necessary for production. This heat all comes from the burning of natural gasses, resulting in mass greenhouse gas emissions. 

In fact, the entire lifespan of polypropylene is filled with the story of greenhouse gas emissions. Even at its death, if it goes unrecycled, plastics are often burnt. The emissions from burning polypropylene have devastating effects on our environment and our changing climate.

The Importance of Recycling
Where the story gets a little better is when recycling becomes a main part of the process. There is already so much polypropylene in existence today that we could sustain all of our habits with recycled goods for years and years to come.
Polypropylene is also incredibly receptive to the idea of being recycled. It can be recycled multiple times before losing the properties that we love it so much for. Using polypropylene for single-use goods is not only unnecessary, but destructive.
So, recycling polypropylene becomes even more important when given the chance. BOC has grabbed on to this idea and now produces goods from recycled polypropylene, like the Recycled Folding Container. If we could continue to drive our efforts toward using recycled plastics, we can see a drop in the manufacturing and a drop in the environmental impact. 

Polypropylene is recycled through a simple process of mechanical separation and chemical recycling. The plastics are slowly heated and reintroduced to a catalyst that allows them to be formed into small pellets that can be reformed into new products. 

While the recycling process still has its drawbacks like energy consumption and some gas emissions, we can cut out the entire process of needing to mine new materials. 

In the next thirty years, producing new polypropylene is expected to put out over 1.3 billion tonnes of CO2. That makes up a huge percentage of overall gas emissions, just so we can have new plastic products. When recycling is such an easy and accessible option, it only makes sense to use the materials we already have. 

The Recycled Folding Container
BOC’s Recycled Folding Container is an example of using recycled polypropylene goods to create new products that can be used for a lifetime. 

Storing your camping gear to wait for its next time out, or even to bring it along with you to the campsite is necessary to protect all of the nice gear you spend money on every year. The Recycled Folding Container is designed to hold a huge amount of gear, but to also easily fold down and take up significantly less space when you don’t need it. 

With 13.2 gallons of storage space, you can easily use this container to keep your gear protected from dust when in storage, or as a basket to access what you need throughout the day at the campsite. Since it’s made from 100% fully recycled goods, you get a unique product that’s helping demonstrate to our world how helpful recycling can be. 

You don’t sacrifice anything to use recycled plastic. The Recycled Folding Container still has a huge load capacity of 55.1 pounds, rated to also hold 220.4 pounds on top of it for six hours. That means it’s a great storage container, seat, table, and so much more. 

Adding a Recycled Folding Container to your collection of gear will help you maintain all of your other outdoor goods and give you a tool to use for a variety of different tasks at the campground. 

Most of all, you’re helping the environment by getting the product you need without producing additional and unnecessary emissions just to get more plastic made. 

Join the movement toward recycled polypropylene and do your part to keep this world exactly the way we love it so we can continue to get out and explore.