Our Tattoosafe team packs your orders with 99% Berlin air and 100% love for the environment. In this blog post you can read how we have drastically reduced our CO2 footprint by using air cushioned foil instead of paper.
A sustainable approach to our planet has always played an important role for Tattoosafe. And not only since Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future have been on everyone's lips. Because the concrete consequences of climate change have been clearly visible for many years. In addition to global warming, for example, it has been scientifically proven without a doubt that the bush fire that raged in Australia a few months ago was a consequence of climate change. This devastating bush fire killed people and animals and destroyed huge areas of important habitat.
We as a company are also fulfilling our responsibility for our planet and have intensively dealt with the topic of sustainability in online mail order.
Greenwashing* & Buzzwords
We have spent a lot of time in our research and in the exchange with experts in order to be able to evaluate the large amount of information on the Internet. Unfortunately, many companies only pretend to pursue environmentally conscious business models. They throw around great sounding terms like "biodegradable plastics", "bio-based plastics", "biodegradable", or "eco-friendly". But as soon as you look behind the façade, you unfortunately realize far too often that sustainability is not seriously considered in these companies. Therefore, we would like to inform you that this blog post was written based on our knowledge as of August 27, 2020 and will be corrected if we gain new insights.
The website of our Federal Environment Agency is very helpful in this regard: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de
By the way, the FAQ on the topic of bio-based and biodegradable plastics is also very interesting: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/biobasierte-biologisch-abbaubare-kunststoffe#haufig-gestellte-fragen-faq
* https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing
Air cushioned foil made of plastic instead of paper
In the past we used 100% recyclable paper as filling material for your packages. Because our belief was that paper is a natural, renewable and recyclable raw material. This is also true - but it can be done in a much more sustainable way for our environment.
Because our intensive examination of the subject has shown that this was a mistaken belief. By looking at the complete value chain of the recycling management of our packaging material, we discovered the following reasons to pack your precious tattoo machines, tattoo inks, tattoo needles etc. with air cushioned foil instead of paper.
By the way: If you should not find any air cushioned foil in one of our packages, it is because we recycle filling material from our suppliers. This is the most sustainable solution in terms of recycling management.
1. 99% air and 1% material = significantly more than 87.5% reduction of our CO2 footprint
For this you have to know that we get the bubble wrap on a roll without air and only fill it with air by machine before using it in your package.
1.1 The extreme saving of material has enormous effects on the storage and stock handling processes as well as on land and air transport. Because for paper as packaging material we needed eight times more pallets than for air cushions.
Conversely, this means that we have reduced the transport routes from the manufacturing facility to us and thus the CO2 footprint by 87.5%.
1.2 The significantly lower weight of the foil also causes a lower CO2 footprint during the transport of your order. Figuratively speaking, we save 4,500 kg of paper for every 100,000 packages shipped. This again corresponds to the planting of 166 trees per year.
Of course we did not suck these numbers out of our tattooed fingers. They were collected by the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and can be further researched there. https://sustainablepackaging.org/
1.3 Since for the packaging of your tattoo machine only 1% material of foil is necessary, the production of the foil causes a significantly lower CO2 footprint compared to the production of the paper, which is needed for the identically safe packaging of your tattoo machine. Unfortunately, we could not research valid and trustworthy numbers. But also here the savings are immense.
2. 100% recyclable & only 1% waste
2.1 Paper is strongly compressed by permanent pressure and vibrations during transport and offers less and less protection for your ordered tattoo supplies. Air cushioned foil , on the other hand, is also compressed by pressure and vibration for a short time, but it restores its original volume and thus offers the same protection permanently. So you can easily recycle our bubble wrap if necessary and pack your own packages safely.
2.2 If you no longer need them, simply release the air from the air cushions. All that remains is the film, which, when crumpled down, hardly takes up any space in the trash can. The result is that your garbage can needs to be emptied much less often. Maybe you don't even need an additional paper-commercial garbage can anymore.
3. 100% recyclable - infinitely often.
The plastic film of the air cushions can be 100% recycled and contains no harmful substances. Even the cores of the film rolls are made of recycled material and are 100% recyclable.
A text printed on the packaging encourages recycling of the material. The text on the film is, of course, water-based ink, which does not affect the purity of the plastic during recycling.
In terms of optimal recycling, the bubble wrap we use can be recycled an infinite number of times. By the way, paper can only be fully recycled 5 times.
Last but not least, it should be mentioned that the air cushioned foil we have chosen is certified according to RoHS and the European Commission and that it meets the requirements set out in EN 13427 and ISO 14021.