Stop Unnecessary Recycling

Stop Unnecessary Recycling

Recycling VS Restoration... Saving time? Saving Money? Saving resources?

Recycling sounds like the perfect solution. The more the better? Recycle as soon as possible? Not so fast.

An article of clothing or footwear, like most other goods we use, is likely to be replaced when it is recycled. The concept of recycling gives comfort to the user who abandons a restorable item, and increased business and profit to the manufacturer, importer, marketer, and dealer that sells the replacement. With the entire industry benefiting from supplying replacements, it is little wonder that everyone wants to encourage recycling. They can appear to be concerned about the environment while actually promoting the use of more resources.

The alternative, restoring rather than replacing, appears to benefit only the end user and is seldom encouraged. Recycling (replacement) is encouraged every possible way, from advertising to slowly providing new features, causing you to keep replacing items with similar items that include new hang tags.

Let's assume you have a 2 year old waterproof breathable jacket. It's a great brand name and used to match the color of your board. It was loaded with great features, comfortable, and appropriate to your use. It has shared some of your greatest moments and would be a friend for life except it's not waterproof or breathable anymore. As it started to get dirty, grungy, smelly and matted you washed it in an expensive technical washing soap and now the repellency and every bit of performance is gone.

We will compare the cost of restoring it to the cost of recycling it.

Shopping: Start with an hour on the net trying to identify the brand, model, features, colors, and prices. Then a visit to the sporting goods retailer to see what is available, how it compares to the net and if colors match your board. Now you might consider recycling the board at the same time. There are plenty of sales people available to help you choose replacements. This can easily spiral into several more sessions on the net and visits to the dealers.

Purchase Price: If you only replace the jacket you might spent only a few hundred dollars unless you choose a brand that promises to donate a portion of your purchase to their favorite charity. If the project proceeds according to industry hopes you ought to be able to justify spending a grand.

Resource Cost: Perhaps 2 Kg of petroleum feedstock for the fabrics, dyes, coatings insulation and packaging and another 4 Kg to fuel the production and transport of the components. The finished item requires transport, tags, marketing, advertising, merchandising and the overhead of all the people involved.

Compare all this to restoration with Sport-Wash residue free detergent (RFD). Sport-Wash has been proven by University Testing to rinse completely and leave no residue. It requires just 30 grams of Sport-Wash and an hour in your washer and dryer. Sport-Wash will not only restore water repellency and breathability, but also insulation, rapid drying, and every other feature to brand new performance. Your old friend is ready to share new adventures and matches your board again.

Competitors claim they restore your clothes, but they have no proof. The residue they leave destroys the features of your high-tech clothes, pushing you into premature recycling. Great for the Sporting goods dealer, but not for your or the environment. Recycling probably costs you and the environment 1000X the cost of restoration with Sport-Wash RDF. ( $0.30 forSport-Wash and $0.10 for cold water and electricity) VS ($300 for the Jacket and $100 for shopping).

Recycling is a good alternative when restoration is impossible or if an item cannot be given to a new owner for reuse, but only people in the business of selling you a replacement will benefit from premature recycling.

Learn all about using Sport-Wash residue free detergent and other Atsko/Sno-Seal products to not only restore clothing and footwear but actually add new functionality. Ourtechnical articles include Clemson University tests of detergent residue by weight and also by char length of polyester. We also measure residue by loss of water repellency. There even is a DIY repellency test if you like to compare detergent yourself.