Why We Don't Use Plastic

Why We Don't Use Plastic

Almost every wooden sauna bucket sold in America has a plastic liner hidden inside it.

Not a coating. An actual polyethylene insert, dropped into a wooden shell. Look at the listings on Amazon and a number of them say so directly in the product title: "Wooden Sauna Bucket (With Plastic Liner)." Others don't mention it at all, and you find out when it arrives.

There's a reason, and it isn't laziness. Coopered wood leaks. Staves expand and contract with moisture and heat, and a bucket that sits dry for three weeks between uses will weep at the seams when you fill it. A plastic liner solves that for about forty cents.

We use stainless steel instead. It costs more, it adds weight, and it solves the same problem without putting a petroleum product in the water you pour onto hot stones and breathe. 

It isn't only the bucket

Once you start looking, you see the same pattern across the whole category.

Seat covers are vinyl. The standard sauna bench cushion is marine-grade PVC over polyurethane foam. It is sold as easy to clean, which it is. You are sitting on coated plastic in a room at 190 degrees.

Towels are polyester, or a blend. Microfiber dries fast, which is the pitch. It is plastic fiber, and it is against your skin while you sweat.

Hats are often not wool. Felt is easy to fake. A large share of "wool felt" sauna hats are a wool-polyester blend or acrylic craft felt with no wool in them at all.

Even the ecological options. One of the better-known Nordic accessory brands sells a bucket line marketed as the environmental choice. Their own description calls it a biocomposite of pulp fibers and clean plastic polymers. It is a nicer plastic. It is still plastic.

Does it actually matter?

We are not going to tell you that a plastic bucket will hurt you. We don't know that, and anyone who tells you they do is selling something.

What we can say is narrower and, we think, more useful.

Sauna is one of the few things people do specifically for their health. The entire reason to sit in a wooden box at 190 degrees is that it seems to be good for you. It is strange to do that surrounded by materials chosen because they were cheap to injection-mold.

Heat and plastic have a relationship. It is well established that polymers release more of what's in them as temperature rises. How much, and whether it matters at sauna temperatures with these particular plastics, is not something we can tell you with any authority.

So our position isn't a health claim. It's simpler than that. When there is a natural material that does the job, use it. Flax, wood, wool, and steel all work in a hot room. They have worked for centuries. The plastic isn't there because it's better. It's there because it's cheaper.

What we do instead

Linen, not cotton and polyester. Our bench textiles and towels are woven from European flax. Flax sheds water where cotton holds it, and it gets softer with every wash rather than wearing out. But it is more expensive than cotton and considerably more expensive than polyester.

Wood and steel, not wood and plastic. The bucket is Ash with a solid stainless liner. The ladle is stainless steel and wood throughout, with no plastic cup.

Wool, actually wool. 100% European wool.

And we tell you what everything is. Every product page lists the material of every component, including the parts you can't see and the parts that aren't natural. The bucket has a steel liner and we say so on the page. We would rather you know exactly what you are buying than believe something slightly better than the truth.

If we ever can't avoid a material we'd prefer not to use, it will be written on the page. That's the promise. It's a smaller promise than most brands in this space make, and it's one we can keep.