Sustainable plastics - soon a reality in Humly products?

One of the biggest challenges in sustainability is to replace plastics in hardware products. 

It’s fair to say that plastics have played a major role in modern society as it has made it possible to produce necessary and durable products at a low price. However, the disadvantages have become both clear and visible. Plastic is a fossil resource with all that entails and slow decomposition causes small plastic particles to find their way into ecosystems. 

Using plastic is neither sustainable nor environmentally friendly.

At Humly, we are constantly looking for new ways to become more sustainable. We have replaced as much plastic as possible in our packaging and minimized the use of plastic in our products. In addition to minimizing, we reuse the plastic packaging used by our component suppliers. But as we said in a previous blogpost on this topic we want to go even further! The question is, is it possible to replace all use of fossil-based (petroleum-based) plastic in our products and if so, with what?

Sustainable plastics are plastics that can be made of materials that are not fossil. What one strives for is to create materials with similar properties that fossil plastics have but are also biodegradable. 

In recent years, bioplastics have become an option. Bioplastics have a molecular structure and properties that are similar to fossil-based plastics and it is biodegradable. Bioplastics are made from biomass, which are often by-products from food production or from biomass specially grown for plastic production. Developments in this area are very rapid and today there is bioplastics based on by-products from fishing and poultry farming as well as based on rice, corn and bamboo.

Next steps for Humly will therefore be to stop using fossil plastics in our products thus driving the change in industry by requiring sustainable plastics, both in future products and when updating present products. In case we cannot find a bioplastic replacement, recycled plastics will be used.

Read more about Humly and our solutions here!