Eliminating use of single-use plastics in washrooms

Over the past 3 years, the Hyvest Group has made it our mission to reduce our impact on the environment. Why you may ask? If manufacturers don’t start making changes from a production viewpoint, how can customers and end users take up the same banner and apply it to their own lives?

The Hyvest Group has made a few small changes that have had a substantial impact. The next time you visit a washroom, take a moment to think about how many of the products are packaged in plastic. You may think it does not amount to much but let’s dive a little deeper. When you enter a washroom, you would prefer it to smell clean and fresh or to have a fragrance that does not smell like a public washroom. For this to happen, fragrance must be introduced, and these fragrances are almost always packaged in aerosol canisters, and the fragrance cans have plastic lids where 100 percent of the time these are immediately discarded. The Hyvest Group pondered this issue and realised there must be a better solution, and with this in mind, our ‘Eco cap’ concept was born – a recyclable cardboard cap that is biodegradable and reuseable, reducing the use of single-use plastics on packaging of our fragrance cans by 4,511 kg per annum. Another significant change the Hyvest Group implemented has been the packaging of the 2-ply laminate paper used in our paper towel dispensers as 40 percent of this product is packaging, which is immediately discarded. This is one of the reasons why Hyvest came up with the concept of a paper wrap for the 2-ply laminate paper towels. The wrap is biodegradable and now also packed in cardboard. More than double the proportion of paper and cardboard packaging is sent for recycling (82.6%) compared to the rate for plastic packing (40%). This equates to a staggering 20,674 kg reduction of single-use plastics per annum.

Worldwide, companies produce 300 million tons of plastic each year, half of which is single-use plastic, and in the washroom the number of products packaged in single-use plastic items is astounding. The pumps used in seat sanitiser and soap dispensers are typically for single-use applications only, together with the attached pouch.

The Hyvest Group has, however, changed this. The soap and sanitiser pumps are reusable, extending the life of the pump and ensuring that they do not end up in a landfill after a single use, and a further reduction of 10,743 kg of single-use plastics is achieved per annum.

Why is the Hyvest Group so passionate about eliminating single-use plastics originating from washroom products? The simple answer is this, if manufacturers don’t start to make minor changes that have a major impact, then who will?

For more information, visit: www.hyvest.co.za