Reusable Packaging News
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RPA also recently released the Excellence in Reusable Packaging award winning Cardinal Healthcare case study.
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and transporting materials at every stage of that process.
“Half a degree may not sound like much,” Debus said, “but as the report details, even that much warming could expose tens of millions more people worldwide to life-threatening heat waves, water shortages, and coastal flooding. Half a degree may mean the difference between a world with coral reefs and Arctic summer sea ice and a world without them.”
Debus stressed that “through reuse and more efficient management of packaging materials, you can lower your greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impact.” Reusables will prevent the need for continuous raw material sourcing and manufacture of single-use products, helping to cut down on industrial emissions.
Evidence of such comparative impact in a comprehensive life cycle analysis was published by RPA member IFCO Systems, showing reusable plastic containers (RPCs have a 31 percent lower global warming impact than expendable alternatives.
Solid Waste
The U.S. produces 20 percent of the planet’s total municipal solid waste, Debus noted, though it is home to only 4 percent of the world’s population. Americans throw out over 4.5 pounds of materials per person every day, yet only about one-third of that gets composted or recycled. About 30 percent of all U.S. “garbage” is packaging, which is of little use to consumers and is typically thrown out after a product is purchased.
“We are in a waste crisis around the world, and it is projected to become substantially worse
“through reuse and more efficient management of packaging materials, you can lower your greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impact”
over the next few decades as rising populations demand more resources and consume more products,” he noted.
“We are at a spot where waste continues to accumulate, and we have to start figuring out not how to manage it, but how to prevent it–how we can do more Reduce and Reuse as a means of waste prevention versus trying to figure out how to recycle and manage all of the single-use trash.”
Plastic Pollution and Recycling
The market challenges and inefficiencies of recycling versus higher priority outcomes such as reduction and reuse are becoming increasingly understood. To the extent that new resource extraction and the continuous production of new goods can be eliminated through reuse, there are positive sustainability outcomes versus recycling. And to make the present state of affairs even more urgent, recycling rates are modest.
The overall recycling rate for plastic bottles in the U.S. is 31.1 percent, and the overall recycling rate is a “stagnant” 35 percent. Plastic drinking bottle generation is staggering, with 480 billion units being sold around the world in 2016 (one million bottles purchased every minute.) When plastic is not recycled it ends up in landfills or the environment, Debus observed.
Plastic pollution, and ocean plastic, in particular, has become a hot-button issue, with a total of 8 million tonnes of plastic ending up in the world’s oceans every year, according to unenvironment.org. And much of plastic ocean pollution is packaging, Debus noted, with nine of the top 10 items recovered by the Ocean Conservancy’s annual coastal cleanup being some form of packaging or fast food dining supplies. Transforming how we design, use and manage packaging products into more systems of reuse will help keep materials out of the environment and maintain their intended purpose over a long period of time.