Waste

All of our blankets are made with recycled textiles; some pre-consumer and some post-consumer waste. Pre-consumer waste is the textiles waste associated with the manufacturing process – offcuts, overruns and deadstock yarn. Post-consumer waste is old garments that can’t be donated or re-worn (like holey woollen sweaters). You can read about what type of waste your blanket is made from on each product page, and in How It’s Made.

To date we have diverted 8,058kg of textile waste from landfill by making blankets

But what happens to your blanket when you no longer want it? Well, we use the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s circular economy principles to determine the best second life for your blanket. So before we remanufacture old blankets, we find use for them in their current form. This means, we keep resources at their highest value for as long as possible and don’t use unnecessary resources like water and energy to remanufacture a blanket that still has life left in it. 

So if you have a Seljak Brand blanket but no longer want it, you can post it back to us for recycling in exchange for a $40 discount off your next Seljak Brand blanket. If it’s in good condition (no rips, holes or stains), we launder it and donate it to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre for distribution to their members. 

If it’s no longer fit for re-use and donating, we recycle it through one of our recycling partners. The blankets made in Lithuania get collected and sent in bulk back to the same mill they’re made. Here, they’re put back into the recycling process and shredded and made into a new yarn along with production offcuts. Our Australian-made blankets are sent to Upparel for onshore textiles recycling.

If you have a Seljak Brand blanket that you’d like recycled, please email hello@seljakbrand.com.au and we’ll give it a second life. This is how we close the loop.

A stack of recycled wool Seljak Brand blankets – you can see the speckles of production runs past!

Recycled wool compared to new wool
Using recycled materials in the creation of new products does indeed make a big difference to carbon footprint. Because we work with recycled materials, our product footprint was very low. In fact, we got the Carbon Reduction Institute to measure exactly what the difference is when making a blanket from new wool vs recycled wool.

Using recycled wool saves 13 times the carbon emissions of new wool.

A new wool blanket (with a weight of 1kg) has a carbon footprint of 45.5 kilograms of CO2 emissions (kgCO2-e). A recycled wool blanket of the same size (which is the equivalent of a Seljak Brand blanket) has a carbon footprint of 3.4kgCO2-e.^ 

Sources:
^Resource use and greenhouse gas emissions from three wool production regions in Australia. Wiedemann, S.G., et al. 112, s.l. : Journal of Cleaner Production, 2016
^Barber, Andrew and Pellow, Glenys. LCA: New Zealand Merino Wool Total Energy Usage. 2006
^Cardoso, Albino Andre Moreira. Life Cycle Assessment of Two textile Products. 2013