Environment

Overview
The Humble Hangers vs the Environment
Every day in the US an estimated 15.5 million plastic, wire and wood hangers are dumped into landfills—every day! World wide an estimated 8 billion hangers goes into landfills every year. That’s enough to fill 4.6 Empire State Buildings from basement to observation deck—every year!
And they don’t lie there quietly either. Plastic hangers made out of polystyrene (6) leach dangerous chemicals such as benzene into our drinking water. Polycarbonate (5) hangers leach bisphenol-A into our ground water. Both can take up to 1,000 years to break down. That’s over 40 generations—all for a simple hanger.

Traditional GOH | Duo Hanger Systems
Traditional GOH (Garments on Hanger) contains great waste of time, energy and natural resources
Both the polystyrene shipping hanger and display hanger ultimately end up in landfill


Modern Ditto GOH | Single Hanger Systems
Product is shipped and displayed on Ditto Hangers. Hangers can go home with customer for further branding power or can be recycled at the store with cardboard boxes.

Sustainable Design
Everything we do, the decisions we make, the products we design, affects us all. One hanger in a landfill, not such a big deal. 15 million every day, that’s a problem.
The elegant simplicity of sustainable design is about looking at old products and solutions in a new way. How is a product used? What is the length of its useful life? Where will it likely end its life? What systems are there to reclaim its materials?

In a way Sustainable Design is reverse designing for proper disposal. Because nothing is worse for a company’s brand than to see its product blow across the street or wash up on the beach.

A retail hanger has a life of a day, a month or 3 months (the normal seasonal sales period). Does it make sense to make it out of a material that takes 1,000 years to break down? If 8 billion of them go into landfills is it wise to make them out of a material that leaches dangerous chemicals into our drinking water?

We all know the answer is no.

At Ditto Hangers we pledge to find the best possible solution to solve some of industry's most vexing environmental problems. And we pledge to seek out new innovation and to keep current with operating systems so we can design our products to flow through them and stay in the loop.

We’re optimistic about the future and believe industry can and must provide leadership in conserving natural resources and taking responsibility for closing the loop on products.

In this section are some of the white papers we've written and some of the research done by others. Our research focuses on materials, processing, recycling, engineering and the environment. We welcome input and suggestions as well as corrections and additions.