On one of the more remote islands on earth, a sanctuary for wildlife, plastic waste is present. Not really where you can easily see it like on a city street, but in the bellies of the 44,000 shearwaters (in addition to other seabirds) that call the place home. It's confronting, for if you think of Lord Howe Island, you wouldn't think of pollution. It's a spectacularly beautiful island off the coast of New South Wales, and has been carefully preserved over the past decades.

But each shearwater on the island will have on average over 50 pieces of individual plastic in their bellies. When scientists studying the birds push on their bellies, they actually crackle like a crumpled takeaway container. It is leading to an early death for most.

The plastic waste comes from the ocean surrounding that island, and indeed off every island and landmass on earth. Oceans are downstream from everything human related, and have been accumulating plastic and pollution for decades now. And that waste, among others, is a tradeoff that we've made for our current civilisation and lifestyle.

The past half century has been a time of tremendous growth and change for millions of people around the world. Economic growth in developing countries has lifted people out of poverty and expanded the market for just about every type of good or service. In the US alone, retail sales have increased from $1.8 trn USD in 1992 to $7.24 trn in 2022, a 4x increase in spending over 30 years. Global figures show a similar story, with annual growth rates for retail goods sales in the last five years estimated at around 8%.

While this consumption has undoubtedly been a positive for people around the world (more choices of items to make live better, ideally more competition on products to lower relative prices, millions in developing countries lifted out of poverty as supply chains became globalised), there have been significant downsides around waste.

These downsides are well known. We are producing a consuming even more stuff, with ever more going into landfills. No place on earth is exempt from this trend.

(World Bank "What a Waste 2.0" A global snapshop of Solid Waste Management to 2050")

Any hope of a solution will need to come in larger part with innovation in the manufacturing process. Innovation in the choices made by the company in the manufacturing process, around the packaging needed for shipping, the packaging for presentation of the product, the products planned obsolescence, and the target consumer’s sentiment/desire. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but an attempt to clarify some of the largest drivers of waste when it comes to consumer products.

This is an incredibly hard ask for companies. Making sure your product can be sold at a profit that will allow your company to survive places huge pressure on that company to cut costs as much as possible. Even the best intentioned are subject to brutal pressures to survive, as competition for any consumer opening their wallet makes it so, so ,so easy to cut corners. To take the cheaper route and do what has been done before.

So what can be done?

Shrug and look the other way? Give up? Protest? Write blog posts that amount to "tut-tut" for people to scan?

We need to start to do something, which leads us back to Manufaktory. To be effective as a company trying to do better, we need to look for the harder route. To try to be better in the choices we make and not to cut those corners.

This will make a traditional path of being a retailer incredibly difficult (more posts to come on the reasons we see for this!). Chances are that this experiment towards a more fully sustainable manufacturing will end the company. We're accepting limitations and constraints that may end up killing Manufaktory.

But we have to try. We can't go on as we have been. Personally, I can't accept that as clever as we can be, a solution cannot be found.

We hope to make Manufaktory into a brand and company that stands for something. But even more so, we hope to have our successes and failures serve as inspiration for others to make changes for the better as well.

So if you have made is this far, welcome. Let's start.