Why Do Blue Tarps Suck? A Deep Dive Into Their Environmental Impact

The Blue Tarp

The ever-present symbol of yardwork, DIY enthusiasm, camping, hauling stuff in your truck, and natural disaster relief. These royal blue coverings quickly replaced the canvas tarps of yore due to their lower cost, lighter weight, and superior water proofness. However, generally speaking, they don’t hold up to what we demand of them, and in turn, are absolutely terrible for the environment.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss why blue tarps suck. In summary, the blue tarps available at almost all hardware stores around the world are made cheaply and without any concern for the environment. To understand this, we will first discuss how they are made and what they are made of; followed by why they don’t hold up and the environmental burden associated with these blue tarps; and lastly discuss alternatives to blue tarps.

A blue tarp in its natural habitat.

How Are Blue Tarps Made?

The blue tarps that we are all familiar with are made from a combination of high-density polyethylene (HDPE), and low-density polyethylene (LDPE). HDPE is the same plastic polymer used to make milk jugs and is actually one of the easier plastics to recycle, while LDPE is used to make plastic shopping bags and is one of the harder plastics to recycle. Polypropylene is sometimes used in making tarps, but it is more often used to make bags and totes than tarps.

The first step is to form HDPE “yarns”. This is done by melting HDPE pellets into a thin sheet and then as the sheet cools, the sheet is sliced into flat yarns that are about 1 millimeter wide. A common thickness is 0.15 millimeters (6 thousandths of an inch, also known as 6 mil); however, tarp thickness varies widely depending on how durable it is rated. After the HDPE yarns are sliced, they are stretched as they cool to increase their tensile strength and then spooled and moved to a different part of the factory.

The spools of HDPE yarn are then arranged behind a water loom or air loom. The loom weaves the HDPE yarns, using water or air as the mechanism to send the weft yarn (goes across the fabric) through the warp yarns (yarns that go the length of the fabric). After weaving, the HDPE fabric is then coated on both sides by a very thin layer of LDPE on both sides.

Spools of HDPE yarn arranged behind a water loom, which weaves the tarp fabric. Color is added with the LDPE coating after weaving.

Most often, only the LDPE coating is treated with color and chemicals that stabilize the plastic against exposure to ultraviolet light (UV). This is why a tarp appears white when it is scratched, and that’s because the HDPE layer isn’t typically pigmented.

After coating, the tarp fabric is cut to size, and then taken through a number of fabrication steps to make the final tarp. Those fabrication steps include:

Thermoplastic welding, which is a fancy way of saying “heating up two different pieces of plastic and then pressing it together.” Typically, a jet of hot air is shot between two pieces of tarp fabric, temporarily melting them, and then run between two sets of rollers that fuse the two pieces together. Thermoplastic welding is used to accomplish two things when making tarps:

Joining two sheets of tarp fabric together to make a bigger tarp.
Creating a hem around the edge of the tarp to increase the strength of the edge and so that it doesn’t fray.

Adding a string inside the hem, further increases the strength of the edges.
Grommeting adds metal grommets around the edge of the tarp.
Folding and packaging are exactly what you think it is, but every customer has their own specifications on how to fold and pack the tarps so that they work with their operations.

A hot air welder is used to fuse two sheets of tarp fabric together.

Once the tarps are folded and packaged, they are shipped onto the retail customer, never to be seen again by the manufacturer.

Why Are Most Tarps Blue?

Well, not all tarps are blue – but blue is certainly the most common color in North America and some other parts of the world. They also come in brown, green, white, translucent, and really any color is possible. It is commonly believed that blue is part of an unofficial color classification system, and at some point in time it might have been. But if you ask a tarp company why blue, most manufacturers will tell you: “I don’t know, it’s just what most people order from us.”

Where Are Tarps Made?

Most tarps are made in Eastern, Southeastern, and Southern Asia, where considerable economies of scale have been achieved in this industry. There are some specialized tarp factories in other parts of the world, but China, Vietnam, and India are a few of the largest exporters of tarps, with South Korea and other Asian countries manufacturing more specialized tarps.

Blue tarps waiting to be exported from a factory in Southeast Asia.

So Why Do Blue Tarps Suck?

We’ve all seen it before. You buy a shiny new tarp for some yardwork at the beginning of the summer. You use it to cover some mulch for your garden, pile branches on it, put a pile of leaves on top of it, and at the end of the summer, you use it to cover some firewood, a grill or some outdoor furniture.

Come next springtime, you pull the tarp off and it tears right apart, spreading tiny little pieces of plastic everywhere. Then, out of nowhere, a big gust of wind comes along and the tarp seemingly disintegrates before your eyes spreading tiny little blue strands all over the place. You then continue to find those blue strands for years, and every time you find one, you mutter “ugh”.

So that’s the blue tarp experience, and why blue tarps suck. But why does that happen? Well, it happens for three key reasons.

The first reason is that, because the tarps are cheap, they use cheap UV stabilizers to protect against UV exposure. Most tarps cannot survive more than a year of UV exposure because the UV stabilizers degrade over time. If you remember, to reduce costs, most manufacturers only add UV stabilizers to the thin LDPE coating. Therefore, once those UV stabilizers are done, the non-UV stabilized HDPE yarns are exposed to UV. While exposed to the elements, those HDPE yarns become brittle, and will tear under tension.

The second reason is that tarps have very low abrasion resistance. As they get rubbed on or dragged across things, that very thin LDPE coating is rubbed off. Once the LDPE coating is rubbed off, there really isn’t anything holding the woven HDPE yarns together other than their weave. So once a yarn gets cut or torn, every neighboring yarn begins to unravel very quickly. Add in the UV damage, and HDPE/LDPE tarps can disintegrate very quickly and unexpectedly.

The third and final reason is that they are cheaply woven. The HDPE threads are woven in the simplest way possible. There are no follow yarns that hold it all together, or reinforcing yarns that are thicker than the others to provide a rip-stop characteristic. Therefore, once the LDPE layer degrades, there is nothing holding the HDPE yarns back from unraveling.

While hems and strings add strength to the edge of the tarp, they do nothing to protect the middle of the tarp against UV exposure, abrasion, and unraveling. Very often, people find their tarp edges intact while the middle is disintegrating.

Wait, what about those grommets? They are made of metal, so that’s strong, right? Yes, while those metal grommets are way stronger than the plastic tarp, you are also weakening the tarp to install them. When installing grommets, a hole is punched in the hem of the tarp, and then the two sides of the grommet are pressed together through the hole. Because the grommet can withstand more tension than the tarp fabric, there is a point where the grommet begins to tear the tarp fabric. Once the fabric is torn, the grommet will fall out.

Traditional metal grommets are prone to getting pulled out, compared to Renegade grommets made from recycled fabric, and are welded to the tarp fabric.

While there are more durable tarps out there, like those rated as “heavy duty”, “super-heavy duty” and “industrial strength” that last longer than the cheaper blue tarps, by in large plastic tarps made from HDPE and LDPE do not last that long for all of the reasons mentioned above.

Where Do Blue Tarps Go to Die?

The landfill is where most tarps end up, assuming that they didn’t completely disintegrate which spews thousands of microplastics into the environment. Unfortunately, a lot of people dump old tarps out into the wild, throwing them into forests or ditches, where they also shed thousands of microplastics into the environment.

Are They Bad for the Environment?

Yes, they are bad for the environment, though not in the same way as dumping toxic sludge into a National Park or burning coal in your backyard for fun. The negative environmental impact of tarps is primarily due to the plastic pollution that they create, which is the focus of our discussion below, rather than their carbon emissions. In the grand scheme of things, a tarp’s carbon footprint is fairly small. For comparison, the carbon footprint of a single ticket holder’s one-way commercial flight from Los Angeles, CA to New York City is equal to the carbon footprint of hundreds of tarps.

As mentioned above, tarps shed thousands of microplastics in the form of tiny flakes of LDPE and thousands of HDPE strands during their lifecycle. These microplastics end up in the environment and take hundreds of years to break down. While in the environment, they can be ingested by animals (including humans), and change soil structure affecting plant growth, among all of the broader effects that plastic pollution has on how ecosystems function. In a 2022 academic study that established methods to detect plastic in the human bloodstream, 23% of study participants had either HDPE or LDPE in their blood, with yet to be understood effects on the human metabolism (Leslie et al, 2022. Discovery and quantification of plastic particle pollution in human blood. Environment International. Volume 163, May 2022, 107199).

HDPE/LDPE tarps disintegrate with prolonged UV exposure, becoming a source of environmental microplastic pollution.

At the end of a tarp’s life, responsible disposal helps reduce the environmental impact of a tarp, but it does not fix the problem of microplastic shedding while they are in use. While HDPE and LDPE are both commonly recycled types of plastic, they are in a form that is extremely difficult to recycle for three reasons:

First, the added grommets and reinforcing string (often made from nylon) would need to be removed from the HDPE and LDPE to prevent contamination of the recycled resin. This is impractical.

The addition of reinforcing grommets and string makes recycling more difficult and does little to improve the lifespan of the tarp.

Second, tarps are very hard to mechanically recycle because of the thick HDPE yarns. Specialized fabric recycling equipment is required to recycle common blue tarps. Therefore, they are only accepted by specialized industrial recycling facilities that rely on corporate off-take contracts rather than trying to recover tarps from millions of retail customers.

The third and final reason is that tarp manufacturers don’t care. Once they sell the tarps, they are no longer responsible for those tarps. While some governments are enacting Extended Producer Responsibility laws, which require manufacturers to recover and properly dispose of or recycle their products, these laws are limited to larger items like mattresses and tires – but not tarps. Therefore, once a tarp leaves a factory its fate is up to the final user of that tarp.

What Are Alternatives to the Blue Tarps?

We’re glad you asked. While canvas tarps have been around for millennia in one form or another, they are heavy, can rot, and are expensive. Therefore, what are cost effective alternatives to the blue tarp that don’t have as much of an impact on the environment? We will discuss four potential alternatives below.

The first alternative is not to use a tarp. Simple, clean, effective, and cheap. Does your picnic table that can withstand the summer sun and rain really need a tarp to protect it from snow? It’s always a good question to ask yourself when considering a purchase. However, if you really do need a tarp, what are the other options?

A second alternative is paper drop cloths, but not the ones coated with plastic! These are a great option for light duty one-off projects, such as painting a piece of furniture or for use inside of your home. But they won’t be of any use on your pickup truck or for protecting firewood from snow and rain.

The third alternative is PVC tarps, which are a heavy-duty alternative to HDPE and LDPE tarps, but we do not recommend these at all. PVC stands for polyvinyl chloride and is made from vinyl chloride which is a known carcinogen according to the National Institute of Health. Vinyl chloride was also the chemical that was spilled in a 2022 train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio. Additionally, phthalates are added to PVC to make it more flexible, and those are also known to cause harm to humans and animals. Lastly, PVC is heavier than other plastics like polyethylene and polypropylene, and it cannot be recycled because the PVC is applied to a woven fabric made from nylon or polyester. Therefore, it is a mixed material, which is impractical for recycling.

Polypropylene tarps are the fourth alternative, while a new entrant to the tarp category they are proving to be a big winner. Renegade Plastics is redefining tarp sustainability with the Renegade Tarp. Made from a proprietary fabric, these tarps are as strong as PVC tarps, free of PVC and phthalates, and will be recycled by Renegade at the end of their life. These tarps are recyclable because both the woven tarp fabric and the coating are polypropylene, while the grommets are made from recycled Renegade fabrics.