- One family pocketed $7.6 million by taking cans and bottles from Arizona and recycling them in California. That’s fraud, prosecutors say. Yahoo News
- California family who recycled 178 tons of cans and bottles busted in $7.6M fraud scheme New York Post
- The family that made $7.6 million from recycling cans and bottles was just charged with fraud Fortune
- Family’s recycling totaled $7.6 million — all illegal, California prosecutors say The Santa Rosa Press Democrat
- 8 family members charged in California $7.6 million recycling scheme CBS News
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Tag Archives: Recycling
Indiana’s recycling plant fire is mostly out, but evacuations remain as crews monitor air quality and clear debris from schools and homes – CNN
- Indiana’s recycling plant fire is mostly out, but evacuations remain as crews monitor air quality and clear debris from schools and homes CNN
- Richmond Toxic Fire: City to offer free cleaning kits to residents, discuss lift of evacuation order WHIO
- EPA begins debris removal process in Indiana, Ohio WDTN.com
- Focus turns to getting displaced Richmond residents home as firefighters control blaze Palladium-Item
- Hundreds still waiting for OK to go home after Indiana recycling plant fire. Officials set to evaluate the evacuation order today CNN
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Scientists Found Superworms That Love Eating Styrofoam, And It Could Be a Good Thing
Packing material, disposable cutlery, CD cases: Polystyrene is among the most common forms of plastic, but recycling it isn’t easy and the vast majority ends up in landfills or finds its way to the oceans where it threatens marine life.
Scientists at Australia’s University of Queensland have now discovered that superworms – the larvae of Zophobas morio darkling beetles – are eager to dine on the substance, and their gut enzymes could hold the key to higher recycling rates.
Chris Rinke, who led a study that was published in the journal Microbial Genomics on Thursday, told AFP previous reports had shown that tiny waxworms and mealworms (which are also beetle larvae) had a good track record when it came to eating plastic, “so we hypothesized that the much larger superworms can eat even more.”
Superworms grow up to two inches (five centimeters) and are bred as a food source for reptiles and birds, or even for humans in countries such as Thailand and Mexico.
Rinke and his team fed superworms different diets over a three week period, with some given polystyrene foam, commonly known as styrofoam, some bran, and others not fed at all.
“We confirmed that superworms can survive on a sole polystyrene diet, and even gain a small amount of weight – compared to a starvation control group – which suggests that the worms can gain energy from eating polystyrene,” he said.
Polystyrene in the gut of a worm. (University of Queensland)
Although the polystyrene-reared superworms completed their life cycle, becoming pupae and then fully developed adult beetles, tests revealed a loss of microbial diversity in their guts and potential pathogens.
These findings suggested that while the bugs can survive on polystyrene, it is not a nutritious diet and impacts their health.
Next, the team used a technique called metagenomics to analyze the microbial gut community and find which gene-encoded enzymes were involved in degrading the plastic.
Bio-upcycling
One way to put the findings to use would be to provide superworms with food waste or agricultural bioproducts to consume alongside polystyrene.
“This could be a way to improve the health of the worms and to deal with the large amount of food waste in Western countries,” said Rinke.
But while breeding more worms for this purpose is possible, he envisages another route: creating recycling plants that mimic what the larvae do, which is to first shred the plastic in their mouths then digest it through bacterial enzymes.
“Ultimately, we want to take the superworms out of the equation,” he said, and he now plans more research aimed at finding the most efficient enzymes, then enhancing them further through enzyme engineering.
The breakdown products from that reaction could then be fed to other microbes to create high-value compounds, such as bioplastics, in what he hopes would become an economically viable “upcycling” approach.
© Agence France-Presse
Iberdrola sets up firm focused on recycling wind turbine blades
Wind turbine blades photographed at a site in Denmark. The issue of what to do with blades when they’re no longer needed is a headache for the industry.
Jonathanfilskov-photography | Istock | Getty Images
Spanish energy firm Iberdrola has jointly established a company that will recycle components used in renewable energy installations, including wind turbine blades.
In a statement last week Iberdrola said the company, known as EnergyLOOP, would develop a blade recycling facility in Navarre, northern Spain.
“The initial objective will be the recovery of wind turbine blade components — mostly glass and carbon fibres and resins — and their reuse in sectors such as energy, aerospace, automotive, textiles, chemicals and construction,” the company said.
EnergyLOOP has been launched by Iberdrola via PERSEO — its “international programme for startups” — and FCC Ámbito. The latter is a subsidiary of FCC Servicios Medio Ambiente.
Iberdrola said EnergyLOOP would also have support from Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, a major player in the manufacture of wind turbines.
The issue of what to do with wind turbine blades when they’re no longer needed is a headache for the industry. This is because the composite materials blades are made from can prove to be difficult to recycle, which means that many end up in landfills when their service life ends.
As the amount of wind turbines being used increases, the topic looks set to become even more pressing. Iberdrola said it was estimated that roughly 5,700 wind turbines would be dismantled in Europe each year in 2030.
Iberdrola is one of several companies to look into the potential of recycling and reusing wind turbine blades, an aim that feeds into the idea of creating a circular economy.
The concept has gained traction in recent years, with many businesses now looking to operate in ways that minimize waste and encourage re-use.
In Sept. 2021, for example, Siemens Gamesa said it had launched a recyclable wind turbine blade, with the firm claiming its RecyclableBlades were “the world’s first recyclable wind turbine blades ready for commercial use offshore.”
A few months earlier, in June 2021, Denmark’s Orsted said it would “reuse, recycle, or recover” all turbine blades in its worldwide portfolio of wind farms once they’re decommissioned.
That June also saw General Electric’s renewables unit and cement manufacturer Holcim strike a deal to explore the recycling of wind turbine blades.
In Jan. 2020 another wind energy giant, Vestas, said it was aiming to produce “zero-waste” turbines by the year 2040.
U.S. plastic recycling rate drops to close to 5% – report
WASHINGTON, May 4 (Reuters) – The rate of plastic waste recycling in the United States fell to between 5%-6% in 2021 as some countries stopped accepting U.S. waste exports and as plastic waste generation surged to new highs, according to a report released on Wednesday.
The report by environmental groups Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics shows the recycling rate has dropped from 8.7% in 2018, the last time the Environmental Protection Agency published recycling figures.
The decline coincides with a sharp drop in plastic waste exports, which had counted as recycled plastic. China and Turkey have since implemented plastic import bans and other countries set plastic waste contamination limits under the Basel Convention Plastic Waste Amendments, which the United States did not ratify in 2019.
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“The U.S. must take responsibility for managing its own plastic waste,” said the report, which used 2018 EPA, 2021 export and recent industry data to estimate the 2021 recycling rate.
The EPA did not release its updated yearly recycling rate data last year. It last published data in 2020 showing 2018 rates.
The agency received funding from the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed last year to support local waste management infrastructure and recycling programs.
“EPA is aware of the report and will review the data,” an EPA spokesperson said, adding it will update its waste and recycling web page “later this year.”
The recycling rate is falling as plastic waste generation soars in the United States, the report said. Per capita plastic waste went from 60 pounds per year in 1980 to 218 pounds in 2018 – a 263% total increase.
The petrochemical and plastic industry has been advocating for improved recycling across the country but is facing pressure to curb its production of virgin plastic.
Last week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched an investigation into the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries’ role in “causing and exacerbating the global plastics pollution crisis” and accused the industry of “perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis.” L2N2WQ2LY
“Recycling does not work, it never will work, and no amount of false advertising will change that,” said report author Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator.
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Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Lincoln Feast
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
How Amazon plans to fix its massive returns problem
Amazon is handling a rapidly growing number of returns that are causing a massive problem for the e-commerce giant and the planet.
A National Retail Federation survey found a record $761 billion of merchandise was returned to retailers in 2021. That amount surpasses what the U.S. spent on national defense in 2021, which was $741 billion.
Amazon wouldn’t share its overall returns numbers, but in 2021, the National Retail Federation estimates 16.6% of all merchandise sold during the holiday season was returned, up more than 56% from the year before. For online purchases, the average rate of return was even higher, at nearly 21%, up from 18% in 2020. With $469 billion of net sales revenue last year, Amazon’s returns numbers are likely staggering.
U.S. returns generate 16 million metric tons of carbon emissions during their complicated reverse journey and up to 5.8 billion pounds of landfill waste each year, according to returns solution provider Optoro.
“We’re talking about billions, billions, and billions of [dollars of] waste that’s a byproduct of consumerism run amok,” said Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia Business School and former CEO of Sears Canada.
“The reverse logistics are always going to be nasty because the merchandise, in most cases, cannot be resold as it was originally,” Cohen said. “The most expedient pathway is into a dumpster, into a landfill.”
Amazon has told CNBC it sends no items to landfills but relies on “energy recovery” as a last resort.
“Energy recovery means you burn something to produce heat, to produce energy. And you rationalize the disposal of goods as a conversion from one form of matter to another,” Cohen said. “To the degree they’re doing that I don’t think they fully reveal.”
Amazon has said it is “working towards a goal of zero product disposal,” although it wouldn’t set a target date for reaching that goal.
“We encourage a second life on all of the products that we receive back,” said Cherris Armour, Amazon’s head of North American returns in an exclusive interview with CNBC.
“And that comes in the form of selling the majority of the items that we do receive. They are resold as new and used, or they go back to the seller or supplier, or we donate them,” Armour said.
Energy recovery, Armour added, is only for “items that we can’t recover or are not recyclable” due to legal or hygienic reasons or product damage.
Armour first joined Amazon 12 years ago, starting as a night shift operations manager at a fulfillment center in Indianapolis. She said the goal of zero product disposal was something they talked about at Amazon for many years.
Cherris Armour, Amazon’s head of North American reverse logistics, poses with two other Amazon employees at a fulfillment center in Phoenix, Arizona, in November 2021.
Amazon
Easy returns are good business, but then what?
Researchers have found that consumers love easy returns.
An often-cited 2018 survey of 1,300 online shoppers found 96% would come back to a retailer if they had a good returns experience, and 69% were deterred from buying if they knew they’d have to pay for return shipping. In 2019, Amazon expanded free, easy returns to millions of items.
“Amazon has really been a game changer in the reverse logistics world because of how easy their returns are,” said Zac Rogers, who ran returns for an Amazon subsidiary called Quidsi from 2010 to 2012 before he became an assistant professor of supply chain management at Colorado State University.
“So now you have your more traditional retailers like Walmart or Target sort of implementing similar policies because that’s a really big piece of how you compete on the retail side of it,” he said. “It creates loyalty to the brand, makes you more likely to sign up for [Amazon’s] Prime, and Prime is really the thing that drives the flywheel of that company.”
Amazon now allows returns at 18,000 locations, including the option to drop off items without a box or label at Kohl’s, UPS and some Whole Foods stores. There’s a Try Before You Buy program for Prime members designed to make returns for clothes even easier, with return labels already included in the box. On the extreme end of easy returns, Amazon is increasingly allowing customers to keep some “returned” items while still refunding them.
“If I tell you to keep the product, instead of counting the cost and the carbon effect of taking it back, I look better as a company, don’t I?” said Tony Sciarrotta, executive director of the Reverse Logistics Association. “Let’s let the people keep it and then it doesn’t count against us. But now you, as a consumer, what do I do with this thing, right?”
Amazon now has to solve the problem of what to do with returns on the back end.
Amazon spent nearly $152 billion on logistics in 2021 — nearly a third of all net sales. That’s up from $119 billion in 2020. Returns factor into these costs, so anything Amazon can do to lower those costs will help the company’s bottom line.
“They’re going to do it for their own self-interests, although they’ll couch it in the name of saving the planet,” Cohen said. “But at the end of the day, their action is going to be based upon the economics of what we’re seeing.”
To that end, in 2019 Amazon launched a donation program that allows U.S. sellers to automatically donate excess and returned goods to a network of 100,000 local charities through a partnership with nonprofit network Good360. The organization works with about 400 companies, including giants such as Walmart, CVS and Nike, but says Amazon is its biggest corporate donor.
Good360 says it coordinates with local charities for direct pickups at more than 230 Amazon facilities, which helps Amazon save on transportation costs as gas prices hit record highs. The nonprofits pay Good360 a fee to help cover freight costs.
They also agree to certain rules before getting access to Amazon donations.
“They’re not going to be reselling those items, putting them on online auction sites, taking them to local flea markets or that sort of thing. So protecting that brand integrity of our donors is really central to what Good360 does,” said Shari Rudolph, Good360’s chief development officer and CMO.
There are also potential tax write-offs that can come with donating to a nonprofit.
“There are some programs that are available,” Rudolph said. “I don’t have any visibility into what the Amazon team is taking advantage of, if anything.”
Good360 program operations manager Regina Freeman handles Amazon returns in Baltimore, Maryland, in September 2020
Jim Halling Photography
Secondary market
There’s also a boom in the secondary market that’s making it easier to make money on secondhand items. Amid mounting pressure from younger shoppers who want sustainable shopping options, and a supply chain backlog causing a shortage of new goods, Colorado State’s Rogers calculated the size of the 2021 secondary market at $688 billion, up from $649 billion in 2020.
As secondhand items became a potential moneymaker, Amazon launched two new programs to rehome returns in 2020. It now gives sellers the option of liquidating returns, sending them to major third-party liquidators such as Liquidity Services to auction them off on the secondary market.
Also in 2020, Amazon started offering select sellers a Grade and Resell option for returns. With this option, Amazon evaluates the returned item and gives it a grade — Like New, Very Good, Good or Acceptable — then resells it on special sections of its site. There’s Warehouse Deals for used goods, Amazon Renewed for refurbished items, Amazon Outlet for overstock, and a tongue-in-cheek daily deal site called Woot! that sells a $10 “Bag of Crap.” Amazon even offers customers gift cards to trade in their used Amazon devices, which it can try to refurbish and resell.
“We expect that these programs will help to give a second life to more than 300 million units a year,” Amazon’s Armour said.
That’s just smart business, explained Rogers, the former Quidsi employee.
“Let’s assume a 20% return rate, that’s $93.8 billion of returns coming in. If instead of getting pennies on the dollar from a salvage dealer, you could get maybe 30 cents on the dollar from strategic targeted disposition, that bumps us up to $28 billion,” said Rogers.
“At $28 billion, having Woot or Amazon Outlet, now that makes a lot more sense because we’re really starting to get a return for our investment,” he said. “Before, when we were at a small scale, it’s like, ‘This is trash, get rid of it.’ Now, when we get bigger, they’re scaling to the point where monetizing those returns, it’d actually be irresponsible not to.”
But reverse logistics experts say the best way to reduce waste, and cut the expense of returns, is to prevent them from happening in the first place and then to create disincentives for returning goods.
“The industry at large would bow down to Amazon in a heartbeat if Amazon were to start to charge for returns because it would give them air cover to do the same,” Cohen said.
Walmart’s InHome hunts for ways to ditch single-use plastics
Walmart is trying to reduce its reliance on single-use plastic bags. It has a pilot program through its subscription grocery service, InHome.
Nicholas Pizzolato
When Walmart rolled out a new grocery delivery service, it tested a bold premise: customers letting a stranger walk into their homes to deliver milk, eggs and other products directly into the fridge.
Now that expanding service, InHome, is testing whether the country’s largest grocer and its shoppers can phase out reliance on single-use plastic bags and other kinds of disposable packaging that wind up in shoppers’ homes — and ultimately, the landfill.
Last fall, Walmart swapped out disposable bags for tote bags that it collected, washed and used again for the subscription service.
The pilot project, which was limited to a single store near the New York metro area, is part of Walmart’s broader effort to deliver on a pledge to move toward reusable, recyclable or industrially compostable packaging for its private brands and reach zero waste in its own operations in the U.S. and Canada by 2025.
In the first half of 2022, Walmart plans to test alternatives to single-use plastic for curbside pickup and home delivery, said Jane Ewing, Walmart’s senior vice president of sustainability. Those services are fast-growing parts of Walmart’s grocery business, after shoppers got used to the convenience during the pandemic.
Wall Street, lawmakers and consumers have put pressure on publicly traded companies to set lofty sustainability goals. A growing number of states, major U.S. cities and countries are banning or charging fees for single-use plastics. Consumers, particularly millennials and Gen Zers, are paying more attention to companies’ environmental impact. And investors are considering environmental, social and governance policies as a factor when deciding when to buy or sell a company’s stock.
Judith Enck, president of the nonprofit Beyond Plastics, said companies are “reading the writing on the wall,” much as they did when states and cities began passing laws that phased in higher minimum wages.
Yet she said she has grown weary of seeing retailers and consumer-packaged goods companies make promises that come with yearslong timetables and incremental steps toward compliance.
“Companies need to be bolder and they need to move faster,” she said. “These shouldn’t be pilots. They should be standard store policy.”
From cucumbers to clamshells
At Walmart, Ewing said her team scours store aisles and backrooms for ways to eliminate plastics from its supply chain, from films that wrap up pallets of merchandise to clamshells that hold leafy greens.
She said Walmart is especially focused on finding ways to keep fruits and vegetables fresh with packaging like what it devised with start-up Apeel: an invisible, edible plant-based coating on a cucumber instead of shrink-wrapping it in plastic.
Yet progress can be slow. For example, Walmart recently removed a plastic window from a box that holds plastic cutlery sold by its private label, Ewing said. That small change will be multiplied across inventory throughout its more than 4,700 U.S. stores. But that doesn’t solve the underlying problem — the plastic utensils themselves.
What’s more, private brands only drive a fraction of Walmart’s total sales. That means it must ultimately coax suppliers to change packaging to shift the balance of single-use plastics at Walmart’s stores. Eliminating or cutting back on packaging is one of the key parts of Project Gigaton, an effort that Walmart launched five years ago that aims to reduce one gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions from the company’s supply chains by 2030.
Walmart is part of Beyond the Bag, an initiative by retailers including Target, CVS Health, Kroger and others to look for ways to remove single-use plastic bags from the environment.
For its part, Walmart has tried Goatote and Chico Bags, two different kiosk systems that allow shoppers to borrow and return reusable bags, and Fill it Forward, an app-enabled tag that customers can add to their own bag, which tracks and incentivizes use by giving rewards.
“Most customers want to do the right thing; they want to lead a more sustainable life,” Ewing said. “But as a retailer, we have to make it easy for them. If it’s too complex, too hard, they’re not going to do it. So we have to figure out how can we build this into the flow of their regular shopping experience and take out the pain points for them.”
By the end of this year, Walmart plans to expand the InHome delivery service’s availability from 6 million to 30 million households. The subscription program costs $19.95 per month.
In the coming months, the grocer envisions that millions more customers will get their milk, pasta and other purchases delivered to the kitchen or garage with reusable tote bags, Ewing said.
Walmart has yet to decide its geographic markets or how many customers will receive the tote service, but Ewing said it will expand the pilot in the Northeast. Ultimately, she said she would like to see the totes used by InHome across the country.
Sustainability is built into other parts of the InHome initiative. For example, Walmart has reserved 5,000 electric delivery vans from General Motors for the service.
A circular system
The tote bags for the InHome pilot are made by Returnity, a company that is trying to move retailers and consumer-packaged goods brands away from disposable boxes and bags and toward a circular system of containers that can be reused. Returnity has developed packaging for Estee Lauder, New Balance and Rent the Runway.
Mike Newman, CEO of Returnity, said for the model to work, reusable packaging must make sense financially. That means packaging that is used frequently, designed with recycled plastics or other sustainable materials, with a return rate of more than 92%. With the Walmart program, he said, the return rate was nearly 100%.
Returnity counts James Reinhart, CEO and co-founder of online thrift store ThredUp, as one of its early investors.
At ThredUp, reusable packaging flopped and became a telling lesson, Newman said. Too many customers just tossed company-provided bags rather than reuse them, he said.
“You have to be cost competitive,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how green it is. If it can’t be economically viable, it’s never going anywhere.”
These Engineers Have Invented an Entirely New Approach to Recycling Plastic
Our planet and everything that lives on it is buckling under the weight of all the plastic waste we’re producing. The volume of these non-biodegradable materials discarded after use is only increasing, so we need new ways to tackle them, and fast.
A new study demonstrates the proof-of-concept of an entirely new approach to plastic recycling, inspired by the way nature naturally ‘recycles’ the components of organic polymers present in our environment.
The approach takes guidance from the fact that proteins within organic polymers are constantly broken down into parts and reassembled into different proteins, without losing the quality of the building blocks. In essence, when it comes to recycling plastic – a synthetic polymer – without degrading it, we have to think smaller.
Proteins are one of the main organic compounds that act as building blocks for everything biological. They’re long chains of molecules (or monomers) known as amino acids, and researchers think that the way these molecules can be broken up and reconfigured suggests a potential strategy for recycling synthetic polymers.
“A protein is like a string of pearls, where each pearl is an amino acid,” says materials scientist Simone Giaveri, from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
“Each pearl has a different color, and the color sequence determines the string structure and consequently its properties. In nature, protein chains break up into the constituent amino acids, and cells put such amino acids back together to form new proteins – that is, they create new strings of pearls with a different color sequence.”
The researchers have called their approach “nature-inspired circular-economy recycling”, or NaCRe for short.
In lab tests, the team was able to divide selected proteins into amino acids, then assemble them into new proteins with different structures and uses. In one case, they turned the proteins from silk into green fluorescent protein, which is a glowing tracer used in biomedical research. Despite this deconstruction and reconstruction, the quality of the proteins remains constant.
(Giaveri et al., Advanced Materials, 2021)
According to the team’s analysis, the mechanisms that naturally occur in proteins could be applied to plastics as well, though developing and scaling up the necessary technology is going to take some time.
There are major differences between natural and synthetic polymers to be taken into account, but the researchers say this new approach to recycling is feasible – and would keep materials in use for the longest possible time.
“It will require a radically different mindset,” says materials scientist Francesco Stellacci, from EPFL. “Polymers are strings of pearls, but synthetic polymers are made mostly of pearls all of the same color and when the color is different, the sequence of color rarely matters.”
“Furthermore, we have no efficient way to assemble synthetic polymers from different color pearls in a way that controls their sequence.”
Even biodegradable plastics create waste residue that must be stockpiled or buried after the recycling process is finished, with the usual knock-on effects for the environment in terms of land usage and pollution. The new strategy could help fix that.
The researchers estimate that across a 70-year lifespan, a person throws away around 2 metric tons of plastic on average – and considering almost 8 billion people are on the planet right now, that’s a catastrophic amount of waste.
And while we’re making some progress in tackling our plastic pollution problem, it’s currently nowhere near enough. A radical shift in thinking and action is required if we’re going to stop plastics doing further damage to our world and our health.
“In the future, sustainability will entail pushing upcycling to the extreme, throwing a lot of different objects together and recycling the mixture to produce every day a different new material,” says Stellacci. “Nature already does this.”
The research has been published in Advanced Materials.
Razer’s New Clothing Line Looks Like Trash
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but even a casual observer can see that Razer’s new clothing collection looks like trash. At least this time it’s intentional.
Following up on its Sneki Snek promotion, in which the sale of a plushie went toward saving 10 trees, Razer is now introducing the Kanagawa Wave Collection. The designs are based on Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic Japanesese woodblock print depicting a rogue wave hitting Sagami Bay. Razer’s goal for this collection, which will be available in a limited run of 1,337 pieces per item, is to fund the removal of one kilogram of plastic from the ocean per item sold.
The obvious difference between the classic Japanese print and Razer’s version is that in addition to new accents using Razer’s signature shade of neon green, Razer also added in a bunch of bottles, cups, and other plastic garbage to call attention to the plight of our oceans. Admittedly, it’s not a very subtle message, but it certainly gets the point across.
Razer said the clothing line itself—which includes a hat, shorts, t-shirt, tank top, and a hoodie ranging from $50 to $150—is made from fabric created out of marine plastic recovered from beaches, with each item featuring Razer’s updated take on the The Great Wave prominently across each piece. It’s a bold look for sure, though if your home is already filled with neon green gadgets with tons of built-in RGB lighting, the Kanagawa Collection will probably fit right in.
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Razer said that both Sneki Snek and the Kanagawa Collection were created to “engage and galvanize the community to help preserve nature and ensure the world remains an arena we can all continue to play in,” which is certainly a worthy cause.
However, the more encouraging part about about Razer’s eco clothing line is that it’s actually part of a larger 10-year initiative from Razer to help reduce its environmental impact, which ranges from eliminating single use plastics at its offices, a pledge to use 100% renewable power at its offices by 2025, and a goal to become completely carbon neutral by 2030. But potentially Razer’s most important goal is its endeavor to use recycled or recyclable material in all of its products by 2030 through the use of things like eco-friendly PCR plastics.
So even if you don’t like the the look of the Kanagawa Collection, it seems like Razer is really trying to address climate change and climate responsibility in its own way.
Alternatively, if you are interested in Razer’s new clothing line, you’d better set a reminder for April 7 at 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT. That’s when the entire collection officially goes on sale.
[Update 8:00 PM ET] Added new information about Razer’s larger 10-year plan to go green which includes the use of more recycled plastics, switching to renewable energy, and new investments into environmental sustainability.