When it comes to the federal government’s role in safeguarding the planet and its most valuable natural resources, the United States is about to perilously stumble headfirst into the great unknown. Domestic doom and gloom aside, this certainly doesn’t mean that some of the world’s largest and most powerful companies aren’t continuing to strive toward a better — and cleaner — future. Earlier this week at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the chichi Swiss ski resort of Davos, a 30-page report on plastic packaging waste with some rather sobering key findings was released to the public. Titled “The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the Future of Plastics,” the report finds that most (95 percent) potentially reusable and recyclable plastic packaging material, worth $80 billion to $120 billion annually, is only used once before being discarded and lost to the economy. A staggering amount of this cast-off plastic packaging, about 8 million metric tons per year, eventually winds up in the world’s oceans. Per the report, that’s roughly a garbage truckload full per minute. And if we continue on this current track, by the year 2050, the oceans will be home to more plastic waste, by weight, than fish. Can you image ... more discarded plastic junk in the ocean than there there is fish? The good news? As revealed at Davos, 40 "industry leaders" — industry leaders responsible for producing plastic shampoo bottles, mayonnaise jars, and 2-liter jugs of diet soda that could potentially outweigh the world's marine life within a matter of only a few decades — have come together to reverse this troubling trend and embrace a global circular economy in which “plastics never become waste.” Published in collaboration between the WEF and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a British charity founded in 2009 by the record-breaking yachtswoman-turned-circular economy-promoting philanthropist, with support from the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment, the report describes itself as the first comprehensive vision for a plastic waste-free future.   Bringing together the world’s top purveyors of plastic packaging materials (those aforementioned soda bottles and mayonnaise jars) to endorse the report and subsequently work toward the common goal of keeping plastic packaging out of oceans and re-circulating well after its initial use will prove to be nothing but beneficial. As noted in the report, 20 percent of plastic packaging could be “profitably reused” while another 50 percent could be recycled. It’s up to global business leaders to figure out, via innovative (re)design solutions, how to tackle that remaining 30 percent of waste, equivalent to 10 billion garbage bags, that will inevitably wind up in landfills and incinerators. Currently, only 14 percent of plastic packaging waste is reused or recycled. Reads the report’s executive summary: The overarching vision of the New Plastics Economy is that plastics never become waste; rather, they re-enter the economy as valuable technical or biological nutrients. The New Plastics Economy is underpinned by and aligns with principles of the circular economy. Its ambition is to deliver better system-wide economic and environmental outcomes by creating an effective after-use plastics economy, drastically reducing the leakage of plastics into natural systems (in particular the ocean) and other negative externalities; and decoupling from fossil feedstocks.

Think about the last time you attended a professional conference or trade show. Were meals provided, or was it mostly coffee and light snacks? Were breaks catered by the host hotel or conference venue, or an outside company that transported pre-prepared foods? Were coffee and other refreshments served in ceramic mugs and plastic or glass tumblers, or paper and foam cups? Did meals come with actual reusable silverware and plates, or disposable forks and knives? Walking yourself through the answers to these questions may bring to mind the numerous times difficult-to-recycle food and beverage disposables are thrown in the garbage bin at conferences. By and large, used tabletop disposables and food packaging containers are not accepted by municipal recycling facilities due to their size, mixed material and contamination from contact with organic matter (aka leftover food). Also difficult to recycle are articles of the convenience packaging and single-serving food configurations that are ubiquitous with on-the-go environments like conferences or all-day meetings. Account for the hypothetical three cups for water or coffee a person might throw in the trash per day (assuming they don’t hold onto the same disposable cup). Add to that plastic cutlery, empty chip bags and other examples of difficult-to-recycle food packaging, then multiply that by the number of days in each conference, by the conservative number of at least 100 people attending, times the over 300,000 annual conferences in the U.S. that occur each year, and the reduced cost of labor and logistics associated with disposables is eclipsed by a large volume of avoidable waste that these events generate. Conference organizers can take responsibility for the unique volume of disposables created by these organized meetings by supplementing the largely insufficient waste management systems of host venues with custom solutions. For example, the upcoming Sustainable Foods Summit in San Francisco kicks off Jan. 18-20 with seminar sessions and interactive workshops dedicated to food production and supply chain sustainability and the impacts of food and packaging waste. By working with TerraCycle’s Zero Waste Box division, the organizers at the Sustainable Foods Summit will outfit Parc 55 San Francisco with recycling boxes for shipping and transport materials on the backend, and front-facing boxes for single-serving food and chip bags and plastic Solo cups on the show floor. Displaying them prominently alongside garbage receptacles and where refreshments are distributed, SFS walks the walk of its mission in a practical sense, allowing conference attendees, speakers  and personnel to do their part in the capture of these disposable, yet valuable, material resources. Another conference that recently demonstrated a commitment to achieving zero waste in a big way is Post-Landfill Action Network (PLAN). For the third annual gathering of the Students for Zero Waste Conference, conference organizers actually requested that attendees “bring-your-own everything” (mugs, plates, silverware and napkins), and about half of the 400 attendees did, sporting everything from mason jars to camping gear to use for their lunch and snacks. A tub of reusable silverware from Goodwill took care of the rest of the attendees, and a washing station for people to clean their utensils between meals was also provided. By the end of the event, only two pounds of trash were headed for the landfill. Zeroing in on the unique logistical and waste management needs of conferences and large meetings acknowledges that every problem we have with waste comes down to two things: economics and planning. By taking the initiative to create custom solutions for these distinctive situations, conference and meeting organizers can work sustainability into the event format and add zero waste values to their programming.

Head & Shoulders bottles will use recycled plastics removed from beaches and waterways.

If you don’t like lifeless hair, dandruff on your shoulders and plastics in your ocean, you can tackle all three in the shower. Procter & Gamble announced Thursday that its Head & Shoulders shampoo bottles will be recyclable and made of up to 25 percent “beach plastics,” from trash removed from beaches, oceans, rivers and other waterways. It will be the first shampoo bottle made from recycled beach plastics, according to the company’s press release. “It’s important to understand how big of a disaster ocean plastics are. It’s horrendous,” Tom Szaky, founder of recycling company TerraCycle, told The Huffington Post. TerraCycle is partnering with P&G to make the bottles. “It creates problems for animals that eat them or get trapped in them. It’s a crisis, and I don’t think people understand the scale of it.” The oceans will contain more plastics than fish by 2050, according to a report from the World Economic Forum. At least 8 million tons of plastic end up in the ocean each year. That’s like tossing the contents of one garbage truck into the ocean every minute. The Head & Shoulder “beach plastic” bottles will be available in France this summer, with plans to expand to other countries after that. While most shampoo and conditioner bottles already can be recycled and some are made of recycled plastic, this is the first using recycled marine plastics, according to Szaky, who said that plastic rescued from oceans and other waterways is notoriously hard to collect and process because it is scattered, degraded and often filled with junk. Getting plastics from beach to bottle is an elaborate process, according to Szaky: Hundreds of organizations and volunteers collect plastics from beaches, harbors and other waterways. TerraCycle takes the collected plastic and sorts it, sending some of it, usually high-density polyethylene (HDPE), to P&G for its bottles. The rest is used to make benches and picnic tables that are given to nonprofits. P&G isn’t the first company to try to tackle the problem of ocean plastics in its products: Method has been making hand soap bottles out of ocean plastics for years, and Adidas launched a sneaker line made with recycled ocean plastics last year. And when it comes to removing plastics from our oceans, anyone can play a role. “Make sure you recycle,” Szaky said. “Go to your local ocean conservancy and participate in cleanup efforts. And really think about what you buy ― only buy what you need. Consumerism is behind many of our environmental problems.”  

A year ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, a report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation found that most plastic packaging is used only once; 95% of the value of plastic packaging material, worth $80 billion-$120 billion annually, is lost to the economy after a short first use. In the design of a “New Plastics Economy,” which challenges institutions to move away from the existing linear, take-make-dispose economy, theoretically, these captured plastics can instead be recycled to be used over and over.

The annual World Economic Forum kicked off Monday in Davos, Switzerland, where, for many corporate participants, environmental management is taking center stage. Here are some of the news stories from Davos we’re following: And, TerraCycle, in partnership with the city of Davos, yesterday launched a city-wide collection and recycling program for cigarette butts. In addition to cigarette butts, TerraCycle has developed recycling collection systems for more than 100 hard-to-recycle waste streams. This includes disposable items, flexible packaging, office supplies, beauty products, toothpaste tubes, and used coffee capsules. People in Davos can recycle their cigarette butts by extinguishing and placing them in public ashtrays along the city’s main roads.

Did you know one cigarette butt per litre of water can kill the fish in a stream? The Butt Blitz is an open event that anyone in Canada can join. Participants can either attend a local event where there will be an organized cigarette butt cleanup with Coordinators running the event, or participants can collect butts on their own and drop them off to the coordinator afterwards. The goal of the event is to remove as much cigarette butt litter from our ecosystems across Canada as possible during a one day Butt Blitz event and send the butts to TerraCycle Canada for recycling. We also hope to raise awareness of the negative impacts that cigarette butt litter has on ecosystems and health. Last year we picked up over 122,000 butts on event day!

On this episode of Ditch The Box we welcome the CEO of TerraCycle, Tom Szaky. Tom is the definition of a leader. Born in Budapest, Hungary, he didn’t have a true feel for the power of entrepreneurship until he attended college in the United States. It was in the mecca of capitalism that Tom realized that “entrepreneurship is the most amazingly powerful force. Business is more powerful than war, than politics, in how big and globally transformational it can be… and THAT, is exciting.”   Tom’s entrepreneurial spirit led him to create the incredibly successful business, TerraCycle.  TerraCycle is an innovative recycling company that has become a global leader in recycling hard-to-recycle waste. Although the environmentally driven business is flourishing today, Tom admits that this wasn’t always the case. In the first 5 years of TerraCycle, Tom and his team were close to bankruptcy about a half-dozen times. “The more different the business is, the less of a playbook you have to go by. You have to make it up as you go.” As TerraCycle was trying to make their own “playbook” they were forced to stay innovative in an act of desperation, in an effort to survive. Not only did desperation act as a catalyst for Tom and TerraCycle, innovation that stemmed from a place of desperation helped set the foundation that would allow TerraCycle to thrive in the later years. Looking back on those difficult years and how far TerraCycle has come, Tom offers these words of advice: “Don’t seek desperation, but if desperation comes, there’s magic there.”   Eliminating the idea of waste is the mission of TerraCycle. Tom stresses the importance of finding purpose, finding the center of the company, and never losing sight of that. “Focus on your purpose and have no compromise. But be exceptionally flexible.” If you can master this balancing act and fuel your entrepreneurial vision with innovation, you may just be able to create something as powerful and motivational as Tom Szaky and TerraCycle.

Henkel Corporation, a company that offers LOCTITE threadlocker products to suit the needs of the professional mechanic, is setting forth to reduce the ecologic footprint that the industry’s day-to-day operations place on the environment. Henkel’s sustainability program gives shops the opportunity to recycle used bottles of LOCTITE threadlocker through TerraCycle, a company that makes consumer products from pre-consumer and post-consumer waste and by reusing other waste materials. To participate in the program, shops must purchase a LOCTITE recycling box from their distributor or LOCTITE sales rep and place it on their shop floor. The boxes come with a pre-paid shipping label, so when the box is full, they simply seal the liner and ship it to TerraCycle for recycling. Kenneth Forlenza, Director of Vehicle Repair and Maintenance for North America, explains, “As sustainability goals become more important for industrial and manufacturing companies, many are trying to reduce the amount of waste they generate, and some have adopted ‘zero waste’ programs. Our program with TerraCycle gives customers a simple way to achieve their waste reduction goals by recycling their empty LOCTITE bottles.” There are many reasons that the automotive aftermarket industry should be involved in sustainability initiatives — namely because it can help the industry improve its bottom line. “Reducing energy use, water and waste saves money in the long run. In addition, sustainability is becoming a bigger factor for customers in deciding which companies to do business with,” Forlenza adds. With this initiative, Henkel is reaching beyond the automotive aftermarket; the recycled threadlocker bottles will be repurposed for playgrounds, park benches and other community-centric fixtures. Forlenza explains, “Community involvement is part of Henkel’s commitment to sustainability. We want to contribute to the quality of life in the places where we live and work. Our adhesive recycling program is going to keep LOCTITE bottles out of landfills, but it’s also going to help our communities by providing playground equipment and other needed items.” For more information on the LOCTITE adhesive recycling program, visit www.na.henkel-adhesives.com/recycleloctite.

Ecomaine announced the winners of more than $16,000 in grants awarded to 12 Maine schools as part of the company’s 2017 school Recycling Grants Program. The nonprofit regional waste management organization invited schools in its 58 member communities to apply for grants up to $5,000 in value for waste reduction initiatives. Ecomaine said the awards were chosen on such factors as project outline and ease of replication, school commitment, likelihood of success and sustainability and how compelling and worthy the funding was to the project. South Portland High School will be awarded $820 to purchase TerraCycle boxes in an effort to recycle additional materials that would not be sortable for single-sort recycling.