10 Sustainable Alternatives to Plastic Promotional Items

When you're putting together a promotional item for your brand, you have a lot to consider. Picking the kind of product, figuring out what kind of branding you want on it, knowing how many to order and how you want to distribute them, understanding their purpose; it's a lot!

Another consideration to add to the pile is the sustainability and ethics behind the creation of the item in question. So often, the go-to for any given piece of promotional swag is going to be some kind of plastic. Whether it's PET, Nylon, Polyester, or something else, it ends up everywhere. Worse, as we all know, it lingers. Plastics are devastating from the raw material harvesting to the long-term lack of biodegradation.

The good news is, there are a lot of good alternatives to plastics. Sometimes they're a little more expensive, or they require different manufacturing considerations, or they require specialized suppliers, but at the end of the day, that's a small price to pay to offer something sustainable, ethical, and useful to your audience.

So, what are some of your best alternatives? We've put together ten materials you can investigate and the kinds of items you can get as promotional products made from them.

Instead of Plastic, Try Steel

First up, stainless steel is a great option for a lot of different promotional products. One of the most common by far is the humble water bottle. Promotional, branded water bottles – and insulated travel mugs, thermoses, and other kinds of liquid storage devices – are common in swag bags and other branded product packs. They're a great concept! It's just that plastic is terrible, and using a plastic item for something you eat or drink (even if it's BPA-free) is probably a bad idea in the long run.

Stainless steel is a good alternative, especially for things like drinkware, cookware, straws (with a brush to clean them), and utensils. Steel is obviously more durable, and the value of the items is higher in the minds of your recipients.

Steel does have some issues – not every steel item is made in the USA, for example – but it's still a great option.

Instead of Plastic, Try Canvas

When you think about a swag bag, you often think about the swag first, but what about the bag? All too often, even companies focusing on eco-friendly items might wrap them all in a plastic bag to hand them out. In our minds, that undermines the intention.

We always recommend a good branded canvas tote. Canvas makes a great alternative for non-apparel uses of plastic or plastic fabrics like polyester. Plus, a good bag or tote can be reused for a wide range of purposes, from carrying groceries to organizing items in the home.

Instead of Plastic, Try Glass

Glass is, of course, one of the main alternatives for a lot of different kinds of products. It's also not exactly out of style – a good glass drinkware set can be an excellent piece of branded merchandise – but plastic alternatives have taken over a fair few of the items that used to be glass.

One of the nice things about modern glass is that it's often much more durable and less dangerous than glass used to be. You're less likely to break a glass item, and if you do, it's less likely to immediately shatter into flesh-rending shards. This makes it more likely to survive shipping and more durable for long-term use.

Glass can be used for storage containers, reusable bottles, multipurpose jars and containers, and other sorts of items used to hold things you want to see. They're also easy to add durable branding to with etching, though you're going to have a harder time if you want color.

Instead of Plastic, Try Bamboo

Bamboo is a great product that has been growing in use for a wide range of industries. At first, it was generally just used as a wood alternative, and it still excels at that. Rather than deforesting old-growth woods, bamboo – which grows way faster – can be used for products ranging from containers to cutting boards.

Newer uses of bamboo are also increasingly viable. For example, bamboo fibers processed the right way can be used to create a durable and breathable fabric. Check out these shirts; made with 70% bamboo and 30% cotton, they're durable, comfortable, and eco-friendly. These days, bamboo can be made into all sorts of items, and you'd be surprised at how flexible it can be.

Instead of Plastic, Try Bioplastic

Bioplastics are a kind of plastic replacement that has nearly all of the same benefits as plastic but without the drawbacks of being worse for the environment. Generally, they're made with more easily renewable resources, like plant materials, rather than oil drilled from deep within the earth. They're also frequently more easily degraded (with the right additives) and can break down when discarded in a matter of years rather than centuries.

Some of the most common "green plastics" are made from things like corn and sugarcane, which we already produce in immense quantities around the world. Now, sure, there are issues with that – monoculture crops and the issues with wide-scale farming, genetic modifications to the plants to produce more of what we want at the expense of resources, and so on – but it's a heck of a lot better than petroleum.

Bioplastics can be used in almost all of the same ways as normal plastics. One of the downsides, though, is that if it's not treated, it might not be biodegradable, and while it's recyclable, that still relies on people actually recycling it. It also isn't visibly better than plastic, so without labels, you lose out on some of the marketing benefits of using eco-friendly items.

Instead of Plastic, Try Recycled Paper

Paper products can be used in a lot of different ways for branded merchandise. Notebooks, calendars, planners, bookmarks, cards; there are all sorts of consumables made of paper that would benefit from being made from recycled paper instead.

So, where does paper come in as a replacement for plastic? A lot of it comes down to other sorts of consumables. Paper can be compressed and hardened into something similar to plastic for use in products like boxes, cups, straws, bags, and other items. From packaging to the hard covers of notebooks that might otherwise be plastic, paper can be a viable alternative.

At this point it does start to muddle the waters a bit; where does it cease to be paper and becomes wood pulp instead? What could just be made out of wood – or bamboo – in the first place?

For us, paper products serve a great role for branded items, and while the overlap with plastic is as big, it's still important to cut down on plastic any way you can.

Instead of Plastic, Try Hemp

Hemp falls into the same category as bamboo in some ways. It's a very fast-growing, renewable plant material, and it can be used in a huge array of different items. It's usable for cutlery and cardboard replacements, it's usable as a fiber that can replace plastic-based cloth, and there's even a kind of hemp-based concrete replacement that can serve a role.

When it comes to branded products and sustainable swag, hemp can be a useful material largely in its cloth form. However, there are also certain kinds of plastics made using base plastic materials, but with added hemp for reinforcement, and other additives that encourage biodegradation of the plastic when it's discarded. Hemp can also be used to make papers that require fewer chemicals than normal paper.

Instead of Plastic, Try Mycelium

Alright, this one is a little bit like cheating because it's not actually a replacement for a branded product. Instead, it's a replacement for the materials you use to ship your branded products. All too often, we see companies that spend a lot of time and effort on getting eco-friendly products, eco-friendly printing processes, and all the rest, and then just ship those products in basic chemical-laden cardboard full of Styrofoam and plastic packing materials.

One potentially excellent option is myco-materials, mushroom-based materials that function similarly to polystyrene for packing materials. They're effectively agricultural waste products and mycelium binding it all together, into something that serves the same purpose as foam packaging, but is much more readily biodegradable.

You can learn more about these kinds of products from the companies that make them, and get a good idea of what kinds of benefits they have for your shipping and fulfillment. You may even be able to add some branding to the packing materials as well, doubling down on the value of the branding.

Instead of Plastic, Try Cotton

Cotton is a third option for a fiber replacement that does very well to replace the more artificial, plastic-based fabrics we tend to find all over the market these days. Here at Ethix, we're deeply involved in cotton; a big portion of our store is apparel, and most of our apparel is made using organic cotton.

Cotton does have potential issues, depending on where you get it from. Cotton requires a lot of water to grow and needs to be suited to its environment to do well. Unethical cotton producers will force it to grow through chemicals and siphon off water that people rely on to irrigate. It can also be a source of unethical human treatment depending on how the workers who farm, gin, and weave the cotton are treated.

We take great pains to source our cotton from ethical producers. We know what goes on every step of the way, "from dirt to shirt," as they say, and focus on entirely local production. Our cotton products, you can rest assured, are as ethically produced as possible.

Instead of Plastic, Try Leather

Leather is another fantastic material with a lot of questionable ethics behind it. When harvested properly, it's a sustainable product, and the biggest opposition simply comes from it being an animal product. But, if animals are being raised and slaughtered anyway, their hides might as well be used, right? It's better to embrace their use as leather than to let those hides go to waste and try to push for a vegan society.

Leather products can be fantastically durable. A cared-for leather item can last decades or even lifetimes, after all. We offer a handful of ethically produced leather items, from messenger and computer bags to luggage tags to stationary folders to coasters, all of which can be branded.

Leather is also a great material for the covers of notebooks, especially notebooks that can be refilled or reused. As a plastic replacement, it doesn't always cover the same niches, but it's a lot like steel; you're upgrading the material used, resulting in a much more durable and valuable version of a product.

Other Plastic Replacements

There are a lot of additional materials that can replace plastics for various purposes, including branded merchandise. Some of them are very new and hard to get ahold of, while others might have been supplanted by other new materials or have some kind of drawback of their own.

Still, it can be worth mentioning some of them, such as:

• Silicone. While many people think silicone is a kind of plastic, it's actually made from sand – silica – and is both extremely durable and doesn't break down into microplastics. For durable and long-lasting products, it's fantastic.
• Cork. As a plant material, cork can be relatively renewable and fairly durable, though there are some ethics concerns surrounding the harvesting of cork in large volumes. It also doesn't serve the same purposes as plastic in a lot of cases, so the overlap tends to come down to products like coasters and some fashion accessories.
• Recycled plastics. If plastic is the only option, recycled plastic is better than new plastic, but recycling plastic comes with many challenges and isn't always very effective.

Whatever the case may be, there's almost certainly a good alternative to plastic for the product you're looking into. The only question is, can you get the products you need, produced ethically, in a viable way to use as branded merchandise? We're always trying to expand our store to include products that fit that description, so feel free to browse and see what you find. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask!