Fetching sustainability

West Paw, a Bozeman, Montana-based pet product company, has been in the business of local and sustainable manufacturing for three decades.

The company was founded in 1996 by Spencer Williams, who also serves as CEO, and was inspired by his chocolate lab, Schoggi, as Williams and his wife wanted to find more durable, safe toys.

“She was everything to us, and we were the consumers in our 20s [asking] why is all this product cheap and disposable?” Williams says. “How can we have durable, safe products? So, she was a huge inspiration to this business. … Sustainability on the environmental side has been a core value to the business from Day 1. We’ve been doing this for 30 years now, which I’m really proud to say, and it’s amazing that we’ve had such a great impact.”

Williams was born and raised in Montana, where his family settled five generations ago. After going away to college, he moved back to Montana to create a company that had a positive impact by creating jobs in the state.

The idea was that if Williams could create a company with a local manufacturing footprint rather than outsourcing manufacturing to a factory overseas, he would positively impact the community.

When the company started manufacturing dog toys in 1996, it produced mostly sewn products, primarily using plush from polyester and some acrylic textiles with a conventional polyester fiber fill. Then, in the early 2000s, Williams went into a store and saw a pair of socks made from recycled fiber.

“I thought, if you can make a sock out of recycled fiber, why can’t we make our toys and fiber fill with it? It really helped us to continue that journey toward more sustainable materials,” he says.

Today, West Paw manufactures about 90 percent of its dog toys in Bozeman, with every product containing at least some recycled content, and as sustainability becomes an increasingly important factor in consumer spending decisions, the company continues to look for ways to push recycling as a win-win for the business and its customers.

A better option for pets

In 2004, West Paw debuted its proprietary material for molded dog toys called Zogoflex, a soft, durable thermoplastic elastomer. Williams says what makes Zogoflex unique is its durability coupled with safety and U.S. Food and Drug Administration compliance.

“The origin of Zogoflex was very pure, clean, safe material and 100 percent recyclable,” he says. “We really moved our factories … towards a zero-waste production line, so all our runners and all the seconds, we can chip and regrind, recolor into compatible colors or turn to black if we need to, so we don’t have waste coming out of the factory.”

West Paw’s goal is to manufacture primarily in Montana. Its injection molding operations are exclusively in Bozeman and divided into two product offerings, Zogoflex and its other recycled plastic material, Seaflex, which blends 12 percent ocean-bound plastic with Zogoflex. West Paw also produces some blow-molded products in Michigan, but Williams says they are a small percentage of the company’s product line.

From the beginning, every move has been centered around West Paw’s sustainability footprint. To make its products more sustainable and provide recycled feedstock, the company recycles its dog toys to produce a material that is not only durable and safe but also free of latex and other elements that are not ideal for plastics that go into dogs’ mouths.

Joining the loop

Upon launching Zogoflex in 2004, Williams and his team also wanted to implement a take-back program. If a customer’s pet chewed through a toy or it wasn’t up to their standards, they could return it to West Paw for a refund and to be recycled through the company’s Join the Loop program.

“Join the Loop is an invitation to people, to consumers, to recycle a finished product. And so, to this day, we get consumer take backs, either from a consumer directly or from retail, allowing us to incorporate recycled toys into every product we make,” Williams says.

When the program debuted, he says West Paw was the first in the industry—and still one of the only companies—to offer a take-back program for used toys.

“Sometimes we get toys that are broken, sometimes we get toys the consumer is ready to change out for another color. We get toys for all sorts of reasons,” Williams says of the program.

To send back a West Paw product, customers fill out a form on the company’s website and pay for shipping.

West Paw also has partnered with several local, independent pet stores, which put out Join the Loop drop boxes where customers can deposit used toys no matter the condition. The drop boxes include prepaid shipping labels. When the boxes are full, retailers simply seal them and ship them to West Paw at no cost and receive a replacement box.

Along with providing recycled material for use in West Paw’s manufacturing, the program is meant to encourage consumers to support local retailers.

“It’s much more cost-effective and environmentally friendly to ship back multiple toys in one box rather than one or two here and there, so we’re really glad to have the diverse program to help the consumer meet them where they are, but we really want to see more and more retailers pick up the boxes to make it more efficient and keep consumer traffic going to their stores,” Williams says.

West Paw also tested its drop boxes at select Petsmart locations in 2024 and is hoping to have another test this year to prompt more widespread take back.

“There’s a minority of stores that will bring in those recycled boxes, and we hope that over time, as recycling becomes something that people believe in more, there would be a growth path,” he says. “We’d like to see that grow [of retail collection]. It’s hard with shipping costs today, and it’s hard to see consumers really spend the time [and] the money, to send them back. We think an incentive would be helpful.”

The cusp of innovation

While the Join the Loop take-back program has been successful, Williams says it’s been a challenging for the company to grow, so the next step for West Paw is to find ways to incorporate more recycled material into its products that doesn’t come through Join the Loop.

“What we have been working on for the last two years is to bring more recycled material into our baseline material of Zogoflex, and we believe we are at the cusp of a major innovation there,” he says. “If we can bring in more recycled feedstock into our plastic raw material supply chain across the majority of our product sales, which is Zogoflex, that would have a tremendous impact on our recycled content across the board.”

Williams says his team is working to finalize its research and development (R&D) process and believes that by the end of the year, it will be able to announce increased recycled content across its entire molded product line.

“Worldwide, there are so many challenges around recycling—contamination, the cost to take back, consumer adoption, just belief in general, let alone the mechanics [and] economics of the supply chain,” he says. “All that is so complex.

“We think we now have identified a source that is a reliable [and] dependable supply chain of one of the subcomponents of our raw material that if we can buy that in a consistent manner, which we now believe we can, it would stimulate even more of that recycling to occur, which, as we grow, we’re confident we wouldn’t tap out of that raw material.”

The company’s R&D process has been focused on identifying this supply chain while also not compromising its products’ performance.

“I think that’s a fair request,” Williams says. “It’s up to us in the in the supply chain and the manufacturing and the product design to create quality, and so that has been a foundational part of the research that we’re doing now these last years is how do we get a reliable supply chain that has properties that are better than our current product and that comes in at a price point is compatible with our current product?

“I would encourage small and medium-sized companies to lean into their relationships and partnerships to help explore sustainability in a mutually beneficial way that can grow everybody’s business in a profitable direction.”

The author is managing editor of Recycling Today and can be reached at mmcnees@gie.net.