One Rope Costs 46 kg of CO2 to Make. Then We Bin It.

Last week a climber handed me a retired rope at the workshop. He said sorry, like he was giving me a bag of rubbish.

I told him what I tell everyone. This is not rubbish. This rope caught falls. It probably saved someone from a very bad day. And it cost the planet a lot more to make than you would ever guess.

Here is the number that stopped me in my tracks when I first read it. Making one climbing rope produces about 46 kg of CO2. One rope. That is a wee bit mad.

Why ropes get retired long before they look done

Climbing ropes retire after 5 to 10 years even if they look fine on the outside. The core wears invisibly. You cannot see the damage, so the safe call is to stop trusting it. That is the right call. Nobody should climb on a tired rope.

But here is the problem. That rope is nylon. Nylon takes hundreds of years to break down. So a rope gets maybe a decade of use, then sits in landfill for centuries.

And almost none of it gets recycled. Mammut ran a collection scheme in Switzerland with 50 drop-off points. In 3 months they gathered 748 kg of rope. That is brilliant, and also tiny compared to what gets binned every year. The system for rope recycling barely exists.

The numbers, on one wee card

What to do with old climbing rope

My answer is simple. If the rope already exists, use it again. Every belt I make means the carbon spent on that rope keeps earning its keep instead of rotting in the ground.

A recycled climbing rope belt starts from £25 and gets made to your exact waist size, anywhere from 22 to 50 inches. It is built to outlast anything from a big-box store, because climbing rope is designed to hold a falling human. Your trousers are not a challenge to it.

Smaller carbon, smaller price. A climbing rope bracelet is £12, made to your wrist size. A rope keychain starts at £5. Same rope, same story, wee format. They also make easy gifts for climbers.

The ropes come from climbing walls around the UK, including Transition Extreme up here in Aberdeen. Walls retire ropes on a schedule, so there is a steady stream of perfectly good material that just cannot be trusted with lives any more. It can absolutely be trusted with your keys.

And if you have a retired rope of your own gathering dust in a cupboard, do not bin it. Get in touch and donate it. I will turn it into gear with a story, and you get the smug feeling of knowing your old rope is out there holding up someone's trousers.

Stay classy and remember,
Make Waste Useful.

George