MIRUM® End Of Life

MIRUM®, made by Natural Fiber Welding, is designed to be a beautiful, durable material that is equally at home in high-end luxury handbags to utilitarian footwear. While MIRUM® is always plastic-free, and certified 100% Biobased by the USDA, at the end of it's life MIRUM® will most likely fall outside the bounds of biodegradability standards set by provincial regulations. Internal and independent MIRUM® biodegradability studies are ongoing to assess what state and what environment is most conducive to biodegradability and we expect to have data to share publicly in Q1 2023. 

 

MIRUM®, once manufactured in a finished good, is not backyard compostable, like most other consumer goods that use biobased materials with traditional manufacturing or finishing techniques. Finished goods are complex composities that often include synthetic components that complicate a product's end-of-life story. However, pre-industrial MIRUM scraps are recyclable through NFW's proprietary remanufacturing process, so with the correct processes and partnerships, unfinshed cutting scraps can be reclaimed to be re-used or responsibly disposed of as soil amendment. Natural Fiber Welding (NFW) is committed to working with brands and their partner factories to create closed loop systems and to develop plastic-free finished goods that make end-of-life easier to manage. 

 

Each product made with MIRUM® is unique. So with an understanding of the product's design philosophy and finishing techniques, we can understand what intervention may be required at the product's end of life to responsibly reuse or dispose of the material. For pre-consumer waste, like cutting scraps, Natural Fiber Welding (NFW) can establish a takeback agreement with a brand or their factory to reclaim those cutting scraps and reclaim them. For post-consumer waste, it's a bit more challenging. Typically this will involve a brand creating a takeback or buyback program where a consumer can return a MIRUM® product to a third-party to be deconstructed, extracting the MIRUM® components for reclamation. To the end that plastic-free treatments and finishes can be used in product design, this will simplify this end of life process. In short, NFW is committed to being an active partner in product development and building a circular system, but will need to be assessed at the individual product level.