Our vision from the start was clear, we wanted to design body armour with sustainability at the forefront of what we do. Part of this was ensuring that our products could be easily recycled but it didn't take too much scratching under the surface to realise that recycling alone was not the answer to the end-of-life waste problem.
My name is Wil Marschall was born and raised in Samoa, a little island in the South Pacific and then spent the most recent part of my life in London, and where I founded RE ZRO.
I've been working in the design and manufacturing industry for over 15 years. For us, it was really important when we started RE ZRO that sustainability didn't come at the cost of performance. At the end of the day, these are performance products that need to protect users, they have standards that they need to meet, and ultimately, how comfortable and wearable they are is important to the end users. So we tried to focus on building, a range that was as lightweight, comfortable, breathable and flexible as we could achieve, whilst also maintaining the performance requirements that we needed for the CE standard.
The way I have approached my ideas and designing products is to hold myself responsible for the lifecycle of the product. The consumer often gets blamed for how a product is discarded after it's used. Well, the consumer can only buy the solution available to them.
The first thing you need to consider recycling is very important. So our products are designed to be highly recyclable. However, the recycling rates globally are very low. So more often than not products that are destined for recycling all end up in the landfill. So the great part about RE ZRO products is not only does it provide all the protection that you require and that you expect from a market-leading product, passing and surpassing the protection standards.
When a RE ZRO part hits a landfill, our technology attracts and is a catalyst for microbes to colonise, and consume the plastic allowing the microbes to enjoy the taste of plastic and use plastic and the carbon in the plastic as its food source. Because of that, microbes continue to colonise the plastic and consume it much quicker. So through third-party testing that we've done, our parts will biodegrade in three to five years.
What we're trying to make better is for products to be, better for us to use but also better for the environment. That's not always easy. But that's what we want to do with all the products we make is to make sure that it is better.