The New York-based company turns agricultural waste into every day consumer products.
Americans generate 4.48 pounds of trash per person every day. That amounts to 262 million tons of trash every year, much of which will end up in one of 2,000+ active landfills across America — or polluting the environment around us.
While recycling has helped reduce some of the impact, there’s still way too much trash out there, especially disposable products that we use once and discard. With that in mind, there’s been a call for creating more compostable and biodegradable products that will break down in less than 100 days.
The team behind New York-based Emerald Brand might just have the sustainable solution.
Emerald Brand has spent 20 years developing the technology to create a line of consumer products that decompose quickly but also are of the quality that Americans have become accustomed to. The company now sells over 300 products — everything from cups and plates to paper towels and toilet paper to take-out containers and even cleaners and detergents — that are biodegradable, compostable, BPA-free and chlorine free.
Although the company produces a range of consumer products, most of Emerald Brand’s current sales are to businesses that use a lot of disposable goods like stadiums, university campuses and corporations.
“A lot of the Fortune 500 corporations utilize our whole program of products, so they don’t just buy plates for example,’’ said Jaclyn McDuffey, managing director at Emerald Brand. “Companies like Citi Bank and American Express that feed in-house 100,000 a day at their offices across the country. They utilize a sustainable solution. They are really buying a whole program, and what we do for them is measure their environmental footprint production utilizing our materials as to non-sustainable alternatives.”
The driving force behind Emerald Brand is a philosophy known as “Tree-Free.”
The creation of many paper products — everything from cups, plates, and napkins to toilet paper, towels and hundreds of other items — begins with the bark of trees. That has led to deforestation, which is a contributor to climate change.
“Trees absorb the carbon dioxide that we exhale,” McDuffey pointed out. “They also absorb the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that human activities emit.”
Instead of depending on trees — or wasteful plastics — Emerald Brand utilizes “alternative materials” to make its products.
It all starts on the farm. After farmers harvest their crops, about 80 to 90 percent of the weight of the crop is waste material like stalks, fiber and cover crops. But Emerald Brand has developed a formula that can convert that all agricultural waste into its line of products.
“We essentially are using the by-product of agriculture and the by-product of food production — crops like sugar cane, wheat fiber — and utilizing that by-product to essentially produce our products as to using tree or petroleum-based plastic,” McDuffey said.
“We’ve come up with this model for over more than a decade,” McDuffey added. “We’ve developed material technology to be able to use these fibers to produce things like cups, plates, toilets paper, napkins, packaging board, and all these different types of disposables that came from trees that we are able to use these by-products for.”
One of the benefits of this method compared to the alternatives, including using recycled materials, is that Emerald Brand knows exactly what is going into its products.
“We can trace exactly where it came from and we can exactly trace what’s in it, which is essentially nothing because we are not using any bleaching chemicals or anything like that,” McDuffey said. “Whereas recycled fiber, you can’t trace that back, so you don’t know what kind of chemicals ended up in that recycling stream. … We can ensure that there are no latent chemicals in there.”
Emerald Brand works with manufacturers around the country to turn the fibers into finished goods according to its specifications. About 65 percent of the company’s current product portfolio is manufactured in the United States, but Emerald Brand is aiming to produce 80 to 90 percent of its products in the U.S. by 2023, McDuffey said.
And while one of the main goals of Emerald Brand is preserving trees, the company also has developed “plant-to-plastic” technology to take on plastics pollution.
“It’s a similar concept to using agricultural products and by-products to produce rather than using petroleum plastics,” McDuffey said. “Rather than using petrol-based oil to produce plastics resins we utilize agriculture by-products to do the same thing.”
There’s another benefit to this process, McDuffey pointed out.
“Working with the farmers is one of the most rewarding things about the process,” McDuffey said. “We are able to bring income to the farmers, where in the past they would have to pay to have their fields cleared of the agricultural waste.”
While Emerald Brand continues to sell to corporate customers and large event facilities, the company plans to expand into the growing consumer market in the coming years. It currently sells its products in about 200 organic-type grocery stores in the Northeast.
“It’s really a big corporate movement, but we do have a division of our company that sells to individual consumers,” McDuffey said. “We are growing in that space and in the next three years our products will be much more readily available in the retail space.”