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Our exciting new recycling programme

By November 18, 2021August 24th, 2023No Comments

Recycling

One of our key missions at Murray Uniforms is to become more sustainable as a company and ensure we are sending zero waste to landfill. Recently we have been pushing ourselves harder to follow through with our goals regarding recycling and we are happy to be sharing our latest project with you. As a business we have partnered with an organisation that offer a closed loop recycle plan regarding old workwear and uniform.

The recycling process includes six steps as follows:

  • Arranging collection of textiles from our secure unit boxes
  • Collection of recycling takes place
  • Secure shredding of textiles is completed
  • Fibre extraction process, then textiles are baled for recycling
  • We receive a certificate of destruction
  • Textiles recycled back into the UK supply chain

Progression

Throughout 2021 we have been narrowing our focus on sustainability as we believe it is an imperial aspect of growth for many businesses including Murray. As well as the obvious environmental impact, we want to ensure that we are not just discarding items of workwear or uniform, our aim is to have them repurposed to help in other industries.

Murray is proud to say we achieved over 15% reduction in Carbon Emissions per capita in 2020 compared to 2019.

We wanted to share some key stats with you to highlight the situation the textile industry finds itself in:

  • 100 billion items of clothing are made every year
  • ½ million tonnes of textile microplastics enters oceans worldwide every year
  • 1% of clothes are recycled effectively
  • 3 out of 5 t-shirts made today will enter landfill within 12 months
  • A dump truck of textile waste enters landfill every second
  • Of the 40 million workwear garments provided to wearers annually, 90% end up in landfill or incinerated.

Our recycling partnership programme

The primary and most preferred post-shredding method our partner employs is to reuse the material within the UK textiles industry as fabric for new garments and textile products. The next preferred process is to remanufacture the materials for UK products such as insulation.

Our new recycling programme is not the only sustainable activity we have been working on however. The team have been looking into more ways to recycle old uniform and workwear and another project we’ve been working on is with an innovative company who convert textile waste into furniture – predominantly chairs and tables but they also produce shelving with the aim to produce a number of different, useful items. The process itself filters through the fibres and separates them so they can be compressed into recycled furniture. If required, they can produce a range of furniture that can be made to match your company’s brand colours and have long life use, however if these can no longer be used, they are 100% recyclable.

Another company Murray has been partnering with offers us the chance to help offset carbon emissions – we have indeed rolled this programme out at our live event and recent webinar. For every person attending our events, a tree has been planted in Uganda. To date, 60 have been planted offsetting 3798kg CO2e over the next five years. We provide participants a unique tree tracking Id so they can monitor the progression of an individual tree. You can view our Murray dashboard by scanning the QR code.

This is a fantastic way to help gain green land back but our tree planting scheme goes further! Yes, it helps with carbon offsetting but also has a beneficial social aspect. Our tree planting scheme partner operates in Uganda (among other countries), where much of the workforce are subsistence farmers. Tree planting represents additional income for them and their families as well as useful employment on an ongoing basis in tree care, providing an opportunity for some of the world’s poorest people to enjoy a better standard of living.

 

We are pleased to help this cause and although we accept that carbon offsetting is not the ultimate answer to the global climate crisis, we are confident it is a valuable activity to be involved with.

If you’d like more details of the initiatives we’ve been involved in or how they could benefit your business, get in touch via marketing@murray-uniforms.co.uk or 02476 587980.

Image sources:
Freepik.com