Helllooooo my packaging and sustainability friends! I hope everyone had a wonderful Valentines Day! Here is my Valentine for you; won’t you be mine?!?
Today’s post is a little of this and a little of that…
I am in the process of connecting with a friend of a friend who is the chief buyer for a large company of PET bales for re-manufacture into fiber and textiles. He is reported to be very knowledgeable of the PET recycling industry and where the inclusion of thermoforms in said industry is heading. More details to come!?
I am to follow up early next week with my contact at S+S Sorting in regards to the status of their pilot, which looks to understand the technical differences between reprocessing bottle-grade PET vs. thermoform-grade. Stay tuned!
AND, did you happen to see this Plastics News article that discusses the impressive increase in non-bottle rigid plastics recycling?!? Good stuff. However, if you pair that with this article, published yesterday, you can see some of the unforeseen consequences of progress in non-bottle rigid plastics recycling. Just some food for thought…?
My next post will discuss feedback from the last SPC conference (yes, this is from a super long time ago) insofar as updates to the material health working-group is concerned. To wet your whistle, this working group looks to develop metrics and indicators for assessing the material health of different packaging material substrates in regards to the affects of exposure on human health i.e. toxicity. Currently, as discussed in previous posts, packaging LCA-based comparative packaging assessment tools like COMPASS don’t really take into consideration the material health of different package designs as life cycle analysis, by its nature, utilizes weight-based analysis; toxins in packaging material substrates are often times so miniscule that this type of weight-based approach to understanding the ramifications on human health is ambiguous. Does that make some sense? It should with further investigation in my next post.?
Tootles!?