JUTE FACTS

What is it like?

Well, if you want to be technical, it’s a vegetable bast fibre plant. (And no, we haven’t misspelled ‘vegetable-based’; there’s a kind of plant called abast. Linseed and hemp are two others.)

Where’s it from?

The jute fabric industry was pioneered by mill-owners in Dundee, Scotland in the 1820s. By the 1850s they were setting up jute mills in India itself and some of these mills are still working today in India and Bangladesh, mainly. Approximately five million people are involved in the industry. It’s pretty adaptable, too, as plants go. You can grow it where it’s salty, sandy or full of clay. But don’t try it at home unless you’re thirty degrees north or south of the equator. It needs temperatures between 80°F and 95°F and humidity between 70% and 90%.

What’s it for?

What’s it NOT for? Although these days you’re likely to see it hanging off some of the savviest and best dressed shoulders around, it’s in plenty less noticeable places, too: sacks, packaging, carpet-backing, ropes, hessian and canvas. We could go on, but you wouldn’t thank us.

Clever Stuff

Growers who rotate jute with crops like rice and potatoes find it acts as a barrier to diseases and pests which damage those other crops. Plus growing jute leaves the soil jam-packed with the kind of organic gubbins and micronutrients that other crops really thrive on. Stop us if this is getting too technical.

Good Stuff

Jute, naturally. Unlike plastic, it’s not a byproduct of the global petrochemicals industry. And also unlike plastic, it biodegrades completely, to the benefit of the soil.

Bad Stuff

“Shall I put that in a bag for you?” shoppers say “Yes” about six and a half billion times a year. Those plastic bags end up in landfill sites, hedges, ditches, rivers and lakes. They take hundreds of years to break down. Internationally, they mess with whole ecosystems (blocking drains, polluting soil, causing flooding, that kind of thing) If you’re a scientist and paid to look hard at tiny things, you’ll even find particles of plastic in beaches around the world...

Strong Stuff

It’s The Bag That Ate Manhattan! Superman ran away so fast he laddered his tights! Jute keeps Godzilla in a cage! As a pet! Well, ok.......... But it is incredibly strong. And versatile. And in a fight with a plastic bag, you wouldn’t even get odds on the outcome.

Clean Stuff

Get this: jute plants just gobble up CO2! And you know all about CO2, right? So, the world’s most potent greenhouse gas is jute’s dish-of the-day, every day. And jute converts CO2 to oxygen faster even than trees can manage.

How we offset our carbon emissions

Working with co2balance and our suppliers in India to calculate the carbon footprint of the manufacture and transportation of our jute bags. As a result we invested into a range of African Energy Efficiency and forestry projects that offsets this amount, enabling annually 2 million jute bags to be CarbonZero.Our India based factory was the first jute factory to offset their environmental impact. And is also certified to ISO9001 and 9002, currently progressing towards ISO14001.

The carbon offsetting for our jute bags is equivalent to: driving around the world in a standard gas car, 33 times! Taking 79 cars (standard size petrol engine) off the road for a whole year. And is the equivalent amount of carbon that would absorbed by 306 trees (native broadleaf trees) in their lifetime.