How Bird&Be Tackles Plastic Waste

We’re all about making your journey easier—but we also care deeply about minimizing the impact the fertility industry has on the environment. We know that as many as one in six couples struggle to conceive, and if we can help such a sizeable group lessen how much waste gets sent to landfills, it can have a strong impact.

While our push to be more and more sustainable is never finished, here’s what Bird&Be is doing to reduce plastic waste.

Our Prenatal Packaging

We package our supplements into daily sachets inside a monthly cardboard box—an approach that cuts household clutter and waste. The total weight of the plastic used in our sachets each month is less than the weight of one plastic vitamin bottle. The benefits add up even more when your supplement regimen goes beyond the basics: If you’re taking The Power Prenatal instead of buying the eight bottles it’d take to match the ingredient doses, you’re saving five pounds or more of plastic waste per year. When you consider all the people trying to conceive, those savings add up to keep waste out of landfills.

Plus, our sachets are recyclable!  And of course, the cute box your sachets come in is 100-percent recyclable, too. 

Our At-Home Tests

Because pregnancy and ovulation tests are considered ‘medical waste,’ they can’t be recycled or composted—they have to go into the garbage. Some industry experts estimate that pregnancy tests create almost two million pounds of plastic and digital waste annually in the U.S. alone.

Digital tests are an especially big burden because of the mini “computers” they have inside. Electronic waste makes up 70 percent of the toxic waste in landfills, releasing harmful chemicals over time like mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, chromium and flame retardants. These not only pollute our air, water and land but also have a negative impact on our reproductive health.

Ultimately, there’s no need for a digital screen when a sensitive dye-based test can show an accurate result without the e-waste. We’ve also designed our tests to be as minimal as possible, without any extra bulk that makes them look picture-ready but ultimately sends more to the landfill. (For your photo opps, we include a recyclable results card that you can slide your test into and add a message or date.) So how do we stack up? A small- to medium-sized plastic pregnancy test is 1,900 percent heavier than one of our Bird&Be test strips—and if you’re POAS (pee-on-a-stick) addicts like us, you know what a difference that can make.

Our Shipping Materials

We ship our products in small cardboard boxes and skip any extra flourishes that would stand in the way of recycling.

We’re always looking for ways to reduce our environmental footprint and will continue to make improvements wherever we can. We know that climate change is a problem that companies—and all of us as individuals—need to do our part in fighting. Thank you for supporting us in this mission!