Aside from the damage conventional pillows can do to your health, the other obvious cost is $, a strain on your wallet. Not just from the increased number of pillows you might need to get comfortable, but the frequency which you find yourself buying because they don’t last.
But there’s another cost which most people don’t think about when they buy their foam, feather & down, gel, latex, memory foam and any other new high tech, space age pillow which might have appeared since I woke up!
How about the cost to the planet after you throw them in the trash?
Where does your pillow go from there? What happens to it?
After hours of searching on the net without finding any answer other than LANDFILL, I decided to make this my next mission!
I’m appalled to think that in this high tech millennia there is no solution to this foam pillow epidemic. Mattresses – yes, but not pillows.
Even the leading foam pillow manufacturers have no solution and are asking for help to conquer this disposal issue.
Petroleum is the main component in the manufacturing of foam pillows. Yes people, that’s what you’re putting your head on every night, breathing in those chemicals and then when you’re done, choking up the earth.
So with every foam pillow which goes into landfill, taking HUNDREDS OF YEARS or never breaking down and leaching chemicals into the ground, where will it end?
Did you know that there are an average of 10 pillows per household? Most of these synthetic, because there has been no other alternative. Well now there is! Actually buckwheat husk pillows have been used in the East for centuries! But we westerners have been conditioned to foam, mostly due to clever marketing and big companies who have had the monopoly of the pillow market. Anyway don’t get me started on that subject!
So 10 pillows per house @ 9,000,000 households in Australia = 90 million pillows. The recommended replacement or ‘use by date’ for foam (for health reasons) is every 2 years, so that’s 45 million pillows going into landfill each year.
Even if it’s every 5 years, that’s 18 million pillows into landfill each year. And that’s not including the used pillows from resorts, hotels/motels, hospitals, aged care facilities, mining companies, even prisons who currently buy and dump millions of pillows a year. Sadly, it seems this common practice is overlooked and without a solution it will continue.
Next time you go to buy a foam pillow, think about the long term effect it will have on you and the earth and buy a Pure Earth Buckwheat Husk Pillow.
