What Makes Our Bedding Different?
A question we get asked a lot and for good reason too, cardboard’s cardboard right? Wrong...
When we The Green Mile Company first started to market our equine bedding we faced a lot of potential customers who’d already tried the other brands of cardboard bedding and didn’t like what they found. When we asked why a familiar pattern of reasons started to emerge:
- The bedding lies very flat not making a very comfortable bed.
- The bedding is difficult to muck out, sticking to the floor.
- Dust content seemed high.
- Difficult to separate dry bedding from wet using traditional tools.
- Customers found to be removing a lot of part wet bedding which they found to be quite wasteful.
Now some of the issues regarding the mucking out maybe due to inexperience with the bedding, we’re not sure and we are not in the business of criticising potential customers about their stable management. What we did discover was by looking back at the more traditional types of bedding, we found good and bad points which we felt we could take advantage of or leave out as the case may be.
The Tech’ part:
Why is Green Mile Bedding more absorbent than other cardboard bedding? It’s actually the cut part of the cardboard which absorbs the fluid, this allows the fluid to travel between the corrugated flutes and allow the paper to absorb and store this moisture.
With Green Mile Bedding the total surface area which absorbs the liquid (the cut part) is equal to the storage surface area found at the centre of each card board piece. This almost eliminates the possibility of any bedding pieces being partially used which in effect increases the efficiency and cost effectiveness of our bedding
Old Dog, New Tricks...
A lot of our customers will still agree you can’t beat a good straw bed but finding good straw at the right price these days seems a lot harder than most people may think? What we do know about straw is that its natural design makes it an ideal product for making stable beds. Adopting this design and applying it to the beneficial properties of cardboard we have created a bedding that not only make an extremely comfortable bed that is easy for you to manage using traditional bedding tools, but a bed that benefits the animals by keeping them warm and dry.
Turning the bed over to reveal the wet areas for removal gives the cardboard the opportunity to reform. Cardboard holds a lot of memory but when it’s cut into small squares and used as bedding, it loses the opportunity to regain its form once it’s compressed / flattened. Cutting the Cardboard into small strips gives the bedding the opportunity to behave like straw which interlocks with itself creating a bed which is spring and stable, this helps with horses who like to bury their waste or who like to kick their bedding about.