Reground: Eagle Leather's Commitment to Waste Reduction

We've been quietly committing to reducing our waste and increasing our recycling over the last several years as we look to a more sustainable future!

What are we doing to reduce our footprint?

• We only use recycled paper for printing of online orders and any other paperwork printed in store
• Where possible, we use recycled boxes for sending out online orders.
• Where possible, we use Ranpak paper packaging for online orders to protect your goods rather than plastic
• Some orders need to use bubble wrap - but we only buy biodegradable bubble wrap for use in these circumstances. When you receive an order from us with green bubble wrap, it's biodegradable!
• We often use foam chips in our orders, which some customers mistakenly think are really bad for the environment. These chips are actually made from corn, so they're super eco Friendly. These are biodegradable, and if you run water over them they also dissolve!
• We use compostable packing tape and compostable bubble mailers
• When sending in satchels, we use Hero biodegradable bags
• In addition to our soft plastic recycling with Reground (detailed below), we also recycle all of the cardboard boxes we receive with Visy.
• If you find genuine plastic in your order from us, that's us recycling bubble wrap and foam that comes into us from suppliers, as part of our commitment to reuse and reduce rather than buying and adding more packaging waste to the environment.

Reground x Eagle Leather

Big ups to our mates and sustainability partners at Reground who shared us on their IG page earlier this week, asking people to support Melbourne brands that support sustainability during Melbourne Fashion Week!

One of the downsides of running a business is how much plastic comes into us from suppliers around the world, and we couldn't conscionably throw it away without recycling it! For a few years we just carted it around in our car and dropped off a bag here or there at coles, but eventually our assistant co-manager Jay got onto trying to find a more permanent solution. Soft plastics is an area that's really tough to navigate as pages like Planet Ark make lots of recommendations of soft plastic recyclers but they don't do their due diligence to check that these places are actually recycling, so it all feels like a bit of a scam.

Jay (our old assistant manager) called around 30-40 places from the list and all of them either said they don't offer soft plastic recycling, or that do - but when pressed as to what actually happens with it, they would admit that they actually pass it on to Visy to deal with - then we called Visy, and they said they don't recycle soft plastic at all - so who knows what was really happening with all those third party places?!

Enter REGROUND. We finally found a legit place that really does recycle soft plastics, and they're so wonderful to deal with too. Since our partnership started almost 2 years ago, we've recycled 206kg of soft plastic and avoided 165kg of emissions. Big thanks to Jay for not giving up and getting this over the line for us!

In Australia, although soft plastic is technically recyclable it can’t go into our council recycling bins - as a result, most of it (more than 90% of it) ends up in landfill. Their Victorian recycling partner is using Australia’s first soft plastic pyrolysis technology to convert soft plastic back into oil, the material which forms the base of all plastic products. This oil can then be used to create new soft plastic, reducing the need to extract crude oil to produce virgin plastics. This process keeps recycling local and keeps your soft plastic in the local circular economy.

You can check out our full impact report with Reground here.