Most weighted blankets use plastic poly-pellets and synthetic minky fabric, raising concerns about chemicals and static electricity. Baloo Living uses Oeko-Tex certified cotton and glass microbeads instead, which are inert, denser, and won't generate static charge like plastic does.
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Talk to me about toxins in weighted blankets. So you're non toxic. And I know there's all kinds of garbage and bedding that I'm concerned about, but what is present in a lot of blankets and a lot of weighted blankets that you don't have in your blanket?
Well, when we first launched, when I looked around the landscape at what was being offered to people for something that I thought was a very beautiful and personal experience. And you know, obviously you're taking this blanket to bed with you and like any bedding, you're spending hours in bed touc. I saw a lot of synthetic materials. They're calling it minky now. So it's just polyester type fabrics. And the predominant.
They're calling it what?
Minky. Minky. I think the Chinese factories made up this word minky and it's now in use sort of in the American vernacular for weighted blankets. And then the most common fill that I saw at the time was these plastic poly pellets. And so the idea of doing something good for yourself by using a bag of plastic felt so negative to me in terms of the environmental aspect of that. And energetically I just didn't like the idea of that at all. So we launched by using pure cotton, which is certified by Okotex standard, which means it's been lab tested post production to be free from. It used to be the 100, but now it's over 300 of the most commonly found chemicals and toxins that are used in textile production. And we're using glass microbeads and always have. And in my experience, they're a better feel, they're very fine and they contour the body and the sort of more significant, more intimate way than the plastic poly pellets ever did. So it's a better experience for the customer as well.
There's something else that I noticed because I tried the plastic poly pellet one. Glass is dense. So what I am sleeping with, with the baloo, it looks like a blanket and it's heavy. But the other ones look like a puffed sleeping bag. They have these big channels with these big plastic pellets. So my bed looks like a bed. Well, mostly like a bed. I am a biohacker, so that was one thing, but it also, there's something about the blanket being the right thickness that mattered to me. And glass is inert. But plastic pellets especially, lots of them, together they build up a giant static charge. And for listeners who know about what's happening, even with synthetics rubbing against your skin, you have microcurrents that run across your body. And I'm not convinced that it's a really good idea to be sleeping under synthetics and building up a big static charge. That's why we practice earthing and grounding ourselves and things like that. So do I want to sleep with an inert, basically silica based glass, or do I want to sleep with plastic pellets? I think I know. And there's also plastic pellets melt. Not that my bed catches on fire that often, but I still think that just it's a good thing to be a little bit more civilized about it. Where do you get your glass? Is it recycled?
It's not recycled as far as I know. I know there's always something to do. We're just continuing to improve. We have eliminated all of the plastic from our packaging and we have a lot of other environmental initiatives that we work on which we can talk about.
And to be perfectly honest, if I was to cut my baloo blanket open and pour it in my garden, and my garden, by the way, is an organic farm that feeds my community. And also it's not just a little hobby garden. It would do nothing but do the same thing as sand. And I appreciate that very much. Yeah. Okay. And I've never seen any leaking out because these are microbeads, but they're not super tiny. At least I've never had.
You know, they're. They're larger than, like, they're larger than sand, they're slightly larger than sand. They're actually quite beautiful. They're these round, soft, rolly beads. If you put it on a counter, it will roll and never stop. So you want them to stay in the blanket because they become a bit like glitter when they get out. They stick on everything, but they stay in their place.
