Disposable gloves greener and more popular than ever
When it comes to working on vehicles, refinishing furniture or any other activity where your hands could get covered in grease, oil, chemicals or gunk, things are looking up. The rubber glove revolution is the reason why.
Properly called “disposable gloves,” it wasn’t long ago that the only people I knew who wore them were getting ready to inflict some intimate medical examination on me. These days, more and more homeowners and tradespeople are wearing disposable gloves for construction, maintenance and hobby work, and there are two reasons behind the change.
First, people are more concerned about exposure to toxins. The first non-medical person I saw donning disposable gloves was a heavy smoking, heavy drinking woodworker getting ready to stain his latest project. Toxin consciousness is clearly on the rise, and that’s a good thing because toxins can certainly be absorbed through the skin. Understanding this is one reason the use of disposable gloves by ordinary people doing ordinary household tasks has skyrocketed.
The second reason disposable gloves are gaining wider use is because they’re getting better. The best are now more comfortable, tougher and more environmentally responsible than ever. And, technically speaking, the ideal kind of disposable “rubber” gloves for general use are not true rubber at all.
I bought my first box of disposable gloves for use in my home workshop about 10 years ago, and they were just the kind of thing a proctologist would wear. Tight, thin, fragile and rather wimpy-looking, these latex gloves were definitely one-usewonders. In the unlikely event they don’t get torn, standard latex medical gloves aren’t the kind of thing you can put back on easily a second time. They’re too tight and the fingers always turn inside out when you take them off. It’s not long before a box of latex gloves is entirely in the trash — though that’s not as tragic as it used to be.
As welcome as it is to keep my hands free of motor oil, wood stain, grease and goop, peeling off gloves and throwing them away after every use rubs me the wrong way on two counts. Besides being an expensive habit, all that non-biodegradable rubber-like material in landfills is decidedly ungreen. There’s something not quite right about making tons of non-biodegradable trash in an effort to deliver a greener lifestyle, isn’t there?
Discomfort with this contradiction made me sit up and take notice of gloves called Green Monkey. It’s the first tough, easy-to-reuse disposable glove I’ve used that’s also entirely biodegradable. I mentioned these gloves in an earlier column this year, and they’ve quickly come to be my favourite disposable gloves, partly because they don’t need to be thrown away after every use, and partly because they will rot to nothing in reasonable time when they finally are tossed out.
Technically speaking, Green Monkey is made of a synthetic rubber called nitrile. This is better than latex for DIY applications because nitrile offers a better balance between toughness and flexibility. Nitrile is also unlikely to cause allergic reactions. Latex, by contrast, bothers a fair portion of the population after repeated exposure.
The problem with traditional nitrile gloves has been what happens to them after they’re used. It can take more than 200 years for standard nitrile to break down in a landfill, and that’s too long. Green Monkey looks, feels, costs and performs like ordinary nitrile gloves, but they’re designed to break down in about 10 years in a landfill.
Want to reuse disposables as often as possible? Buy them big. Even though my hand isn’t large, I get XXL. Bigger gloves like these are still easy to grip through, but they also offer some hope for putting them on more than once. Visit BaileyLineRoad.com/rubber-gloves for a video tour of standard and biodegradable nitrile workshop gloves.
Steve Maxwell always has a box of disposable gloves open in his Manitoulin Island, Ont., workshop. Visit Steve online at BaileyLineRoad.com