Did you know very clean hands are the order of the day when handling original archive material? Cotton gloves are nice, but they can make the handling of delicate paper rather difficult.
However, archivists do sometimes need to wear protective gloves, for instance when cataloguing photographs or new acquisitions that might be mouldy or contaminated in some way. On these occasions they generally now wear purple nitrile gloves, but that isn’t particularly environmentally-friendly because these are unrecyclable and take many, many years to break down.
Instead, our Archives & Records Manager has done her research and found some biodegradable nitrile gloves – which come in the environment’s favourite shade of green!
They are the same in quality and feel as previous purchases and they meet all the EU standards. They also come at a very reasonable price, so they really don’t cost the Earth.