With global plastic use and its waste on the rise, MaCher has set a goal to cut all virgin and single-use plastics from our business by 2025.
Creating products will always have an impact and MaCher makes thousands of promotional products for companies each year. We believe we have a responsibility to make them responsibly and without single use or virgin plastics. Here’s how we’re going about it.
Approaching design and materials in a different way
At the same time as wanting to cut out plastics, we want to make products in a circular way. This means that scraps and materials that are ‘waste’ for one company can be repurposed as the inputs for what we create. We are keen to find these opportunities.
This needs us to look not only at what and how we design products, but also the materials that we use to create them.
Designing for circularity
Our Circular Design team focuses specifically on how we can minimize our impact across our value chain. The team conducts in-depth research on material impacts, end-of-life scenarios and design elements to develop our internal design standards.
We have developed four “design for” or “D4” categories. By 2025, we are aiming to have 100% of our products fit at least 2 of the 4 categories:
- Waste reduction
- Closed loop
- Reuse
- Zero waste
Categorizing our Materials to help cut out plastics
In 2021, we created our materials hierarchy to identify the sustainability spectrum of materials. This helps us to understand where our biggest materials impacts are and how we can improve.
We still have some work to do. Our our zero plastic goals and mapping our materials has led to significant shifts:
- In 2021/22, we made 32% of our products with certified sustainable or renewable materials compared to just 7% in 2018/19 when we started collecting this data.
- This past year, we still had 3% of products using the dreaded virgin PU or PVC, but that is down from 26% in 2018/19.
Our 2022 sustainability report is available here for more detail.
Our designers are actively focused on creative, alternative and more sustainable designs for our products and we would love to help you.