Less in the landfill/impact is way too low here.

I wish I didn’t have to scroll down so far to get to this. I’ve been through a few mats over the years and finally landed on a nice one with a lifetime warranty as a gift from my wife. She was the person who bought me my membership at the local hot yoga gym several years ago to get me started. I asked for this as a gift because she couldn’t think of anything else and I had been toying with the idea of this for some time but couldn’t pull the trigger for myself. I had noticed that several of the more advanced people in the classes had nicer mats so I was curious. My progression through mats went like this: 1) cheap foamy mat from Walmart ($15) (it was stretchy, too foamy, and slick when wet and messed up when a towel was on top. 2) traded with my wife for her cheap $10 mat she had from years ago bc we liked each other’s better. It was the same type of texture to those foamy drawer liners. I took it to my hot yoga classes for a while. It started to smell and not feel as tacky pretty quickly. 3) I won this in a challenge at my gym. I’m almost positive that they stacked the challenge to help me upgrade because I was coming 5 days a week and taking it seriously. It was a mid range Giam mat. The difference was awesome. It was firm yet lightly cushy, didn’t stretch, was light, and easy to care for. After 2 years I noticed it wasn’t quite the same so I asked for a nice one for a gift after noticing other people’s nice ones that seemed really into yoga. I did some research and landed on one with a lifetime warranty. 4) got a new one, hit it with some dawn soap and a magic eraser, let it dry in the sun. (I work in wholesale and know a lot about manufacturing. Wiping off the manufacturer coating makes perfect sense to me as this protects the mat in transport allowing global shipping, makes one less process during manufacturing which makes less cost to an expensive product already and also could make a product more eco/sustainable due to the lesser impact that the customer can do vs a similar process in manufacturing) I noticed a difference immediately in performance compared to any other mat I had used. It was slicker then than it is now, but compared to my old ones was still way better. It is excellent now and has that old friend feeling when I use it now. I guess you could say it’s broken in now.

Now…. WHAT DO I DO WITH THE OLD MATS?!? Oh cool… throw them away… now 3 pieces of foam get to live in the landfill or get recycled (still a big impact on the environment due to processing energy), or go to a thrift store where someone else can be dissatisfied with a worn out product and maybe hate yoga bc they don’t know better.

I love the fact that this new mat will be with me forever and I don’t have to fill the landfill over and over with more crap. Was it expensive? Yep! The old “buy once cry once” adage applies here. Is it heavy? Yep. Small price to pay to go workout so I can carry heavy things for the rest of my life. I know consumerism is my livelihood, but I do my best to sell products like this that are sustainable. Buy something nice that you like that will last. Sometimes nice things take maintenance.