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This article first appeared in our COP28 issue of My Green Pod Magazine, published 30 November 2023. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox
Every year 14 million duvets, pillows and mattress toppers end up in UK landfills.
‘Around 61,900 tonnes of duvets and pillows enter the waste system in the UK each year’, said Paul Whittey from Penrose Products, the bedding brand behind the Biosnooze pillow. ‘That’s not a number we are comfortable contributing to, so we set about designing a pillow that strikes the perfect balance between feeling good for our customers and being good for the planet.’
The result is the Biosnooze – a British-manufactured luxury pillow that offers a vegan alternative to down that won’t spend hundreds of years in landfill at the end of its useful life.
This super-soft yet supportive pillow is made from a unique blend of virgin polyester and recycled water bottles, which have been given new life as finely spun vegan down.
Polyester is a complex molecule that naturally occurring microbes have a hard time digesting, meaning the standard polyester commonly found in pillows does not biodegrade.
Instead, Biosnooze harnesses the first biodegradable technology to enable manmade fibres to return to materials found in nature.
Fibres inside the Biosnooze are coated with a unique sugar enzyme that makes them easier and more pleasant for microbes to digest.
In accelerated test conditions, Biosnooze fibres reach near-complete biodegradation in under two years, while standard polyester remains almost completely intact.
Independent testing has also shown that the soil left behind from the degradation process contains no plastic and remains perfectly suitable for plant growth.
While many retailers claim to only use down and feather naturally ’gathered’, several reports have uncovered an alarming rate of down and feather used in bedding is still obtained by methods including live plucking.
‘We decided early on that we wanted our pillows to offer the luxury deep-fill feel of a down pillow but without the questionable ethics’, explains Paul. ‘Our innovative new Biosnooze pillow offers the sumptuous feel of down without a feather in sight.’
The Biosnooze pillow offers all the benefits consumers should expect from a luxury down alternative pillow. It’s hypoallergenic, temperature regulating and luxuriously soft yet supportive and machine washable.
The Biosnooze is also the first and only 100% biodegradable polyester pillow made in the UK. It’s shipped directly from its manufacturing site in Nottinghamshire, to avoid any confusion about origin or concerns over transport-related carbon emissions.
The pillow comes in industry-leading compostable packaging made from potato starch, and its environmental impact has been reduced even further through the removal of the traditional sateen care labels.
Instead a scannable QR code, printed using vegetable dyes, takes customers to a dedicated care page.
At a time when luxury and sustainability are no longer mutually exclusive, this pillow presents an opportunity to improve quality of living without ethical or environmental compromise.
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