From manufacturing smartphone cases to other products, Otterbox protective solutions maker Otter Products (Fort Collins, CO) now sees a fresh opportunity in a different market: ready-meals transport packaging for ecommerce. Unlike corrugated boxes that dominate the ready-meal delivery landscape, the company’s new Liviri Fresh case is aligned in the direction of the sustainably-minded reusable, refillable system ala Loop (see Game-changing waste-free shopping platform introduced by TerraCycle at Davos, published January 2019). Unlike Loop, Liviri Fresh is an open-platform approach that will customize and provide the reusable packaging to any ecommerce-delivered ready-meal company in the market. There’s also a serious health concern to the introduction. In a Rutgers-Tennessee State University study in 2017, researchers who ordered 169 meal kits found that nearly 47% of 684 items ordered arrived with surface temperatures above 40 degrees, rendering them unsafe to consume. The solution to that food safety problem is the 19.3 inch-long x 15.8-inch wide by 10.7-inch tall (with lid) Liviri Box that provides a total internal volume of 1,700 cubic inches or 29.4 quarts; the box weighs 12.5 lb. Liviri Fresh is engineered to maintain a 3-day shelf life without using ice. The boxes are nestable and stackable—40 empty units fit in the same space as 24 units full units. It is designed to maintain temperature for three days without ice or other coolant, though using dry ice provides nearly twice the delivery shelf life to increase the e-delivery options. Kyle Fanning, Sr Product Line Manager, Otter Products, provides answers to PlasticsToday’s questions. What is it made of and how is it molded and assembled? Fanning: Liviri Fresh is made from an extensively-tested and proven grade of polypropylene that has surpassed all required standards for shipping containers. This polymer is recyclable, crack-proof, food grade and chemical resistant. Liviri Fresh boxes are injection molded and assembled in Michigan, utilizing a best-in-class automotive and industrial manufacturer for precision and quality. What key factors went into design and development? Fanning: We focused on achieving superior thermal performance—it keeps items in safe temperature range over 80% longer than the top-performing single-use insulation of 1.5-inch-thick recycled denim; durability to achieve up to 75 round trips through the small parcel network; a delightful user experience for both shipper and consumer; and a design-for-recyclability approach at end of life. How was this size/volume determined? Fanning: We dialed in the volume over the last year after detailed discussions with many potential customers. We settled on a size that works well as a medium-to-large box for most perishables shippers. It will comfortably fit the most common meal kit configuration of three meals for two people. What is the nature of the “aerospace-grade insulation”? Fanning: Vacuum insulated panels provide superior thermal performance over single-use insulation. What is the cost of each and how many trips to reach ROI? Fanning: Pricing is variable based on each customer’s unique needs. We’ll offer both purchase and lease options. What was biggest challenge to development? Fanning: Creating a product that was both optimized for the customers’ operations during pack out while still hassle-free for consumers. This version is a second-generation design—we poured all of our learnings from our pilot test first-generation design into our current version. How complex was this to make compared to other Otterbox products? Fanning: It’s a similar process to our ruggedized consumer coolers, so we have the expertise, but making it rugged enough for the small parcel network took significant design work and testing. How is it returned? Where and how is it cleaned? Fanning: The consumer places the included return label on the outside of the box and either sets it out for an auto-scheduled pickup or they can drop off at a shipping location. We have worked out a full cleaning protocol and we can either clean the units at one of our receiving facilities, or we’ll provide the customer with a turnkey approach (protocol and equipment) to do it themselves in their fulfillment centers. What are the branding opportunities in terms of box decoration? Fanning: Customers will have two custom branding decals prominently displayed on the box—one on the front and one on the lid. Has a Life Cycle Assessment been done vs. standard meal-kit delivery packaging? Fanning: We engaged a leading sustainability consultancy, thinkstep, to conduct a comparative LCA. They have submitted their draft LCA to an independent panel for the critical review process. The study will be complete and available in early April. What’s the commercial status? Is any brand or retailer using or testing? Fanning: We conducted a three-month pilot test during the summer of 2018 with two major brands who used our product to ship to their customers. We’re now in discussions with many target customers.  

Trash is a human invention. It is a concept that is foreign to the natural world, and a fairly modern one. Today’s complex materials and mass production have given way to products and packaging designed for single-use. These developments have made our lives more convenient and products more affordable, but most of the resulting waste isn’t accepted by public recycling systems and ends up as garbage.

Bringing awareness to this is key to helping us change the way we think about the world’s limited resources. Seeing garbage as something other than a useless problem is the first step to a less wasteful and more prosperous world. Keyword: seeing.

At TerraCycle, we are on a mission to eliminate the idea of waste and do this in a number of ways. Many of you may be familiar with our national recycling programs, our work integrating beach litter into bottles, or the new Loop initiative to move consumables into durable packages. But one of the more visual, easily understood representations of what we do is upcycle “trash” into useful objects, including art.

 

 

If you visit our offices around the world, you’ll see what I mean. Desks and tables made out of old doors, a Statue of Liberty made of toothpaste tubes, and phone booths repurposed into mini conference rooms. Our largest, the aptly named “Bottle Room,” exists in the middle of our global headquarters and is defined by four walls constructed of clear two-liter plastic bottles, items often thrown away.

 

 

We have an entire team of Design Junkies dedicated to finding solutions for needs around the office and creating new, visually stimulating artworks and products for brand partners. We also work directly with local and international artists to provide material they can use to create art

For example, TerraCycle’s Artist in Residence EdE Sinkovics, turns trash into statements about waste by creating assemblages out of discarded materials, such as cigarette butts into portraits of presidents (Lincoln, The Sustainable Republican, 2018), retired canvas mail bags and old tires into sculptures (Rhino Stamp, 2014; Elephant, 2014), and wine corks into human figures (Madam Cork, 2014).

 

 

His latest work, The Dirt of Venus, reimagines Botticelli’s famous Renaissance painting, The Birth of Venus. A conversation starter, Venus bears vibrant resemblance to its inspiration while entirely made of trash — ocean plastic, to be exact. These artworks face the viewer with uncomfortable truths. Even the most difficult-to-recycle materials can in fact be made into something useful, even beautiful. And, there’s a lot of plastic pollution out there!

These art pieces currently hang in the special art exhibit Scrapped: A Collection of Upcycled Artwork, our first show in partnership with Downtown Trenton Association at Broad Street Bank Gallery open through April 13. The collection, which includes on-site installations and mixed media pieces of varying styles, also includes on-site installations from acclaimed aerosol artist and friend of TerraCycle Leon Rainbow and Brendon Lopez (Streets Keep Callin, 2019), reclaimed textiles artist Heemin Moonin in collaboration with Dororthy McNee (Green Palace, 2019), and TerraCycle employees.

 

 

Scrapped is in line with our mission to change perspectives and connect people through shared experiences. All the featured art utilizes discarded and otherwise “scrapped” materials. Designed to encourage viewers to question their day-to-day lifestyle and their impact on the planet, the upcycled art show transforms garbage into artistic visions that connect the dots between us and the things we throw away.

This exhibit will be back next year, but we intend to continue changing perspectives with our work upcycling and recycling unconventional materials and striving to offer the public a connection to sustainability that empowers and inspires them.

 

 

Creativity and community hold the key to solving the world’s greatest problems, including pollution and waste, and art is a language that brings people together. This Earth Month and beyond, find the educational information, media, music and art that moves you, and share it to change the story about trash.

Episode 13 features Tom Szaky, CEO and founder of TerraCycle, the company that’s about to launch Loop. Loop is a zero-waste delivery system for food and other household items and starts in New York next month.

It's official: The world has a trash problem. Landfills are filling up, recycling is becoming more expensive and less attractive to municipalities, and a lot of trash is finding its way into our parks, rivers, oceans—even our drinking water.

 

When trash is dumped in the landfill, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change, and when trash is incinerated it emits carbon and toxins that cause health problems. Many regions are running out of space to store their trash, so they're shipping it to far-off locations around the country and around the world.

 

That method of trash disposal has worked relatively well for the regions dumping their trash, but it's caused problems for the people who live where the trash is received. Yes, whichever way you slice it, that ever-mounting pile of trash will keep causing problems if we don't take charge of the situation.

 

For decades, municipal ordinances and business practices have made it difficult for ordinary consumers to easily and effectively reduce the amount of waste they generate. Convenience products and tempting time-savers have flooded the market and it's understandable why they've become popular fixtures in the average American home. 

 

Unfortunately for the health of humans, animals, and plants, those convenience items come at an environmental cost. But the tides are turning: More than ever, consumers are eager to simplify their lives and explore sustainable living practices that brings health, balance, and cost-savings to their lives, while at the same time minimizing waste. And there are a number of companies making it easier than ever to live a sustainable life.

 

Scroll through to learn how several companies are helping ordinary people make healthy choices for their home, their family, and their planet.

By Caitlin Castelaz

  Time was, the zero waste movement was led solely by a fringe group of do-gooders who eschewed highly packaged big brands in favor of more sustainable (yet hard to find) alternatives. Today, as bulk foods sections arrive in mainstream grocery stores and demand for waste-free farmers markets increases, the shopping landscape has changed dramatically—and big brands have taken note. In response to the cultural shift, large brands like Unilever, Clorox, Procter and Gamble, and others have banded together to create Loop, a grocery delivery service that emulates the milkman delivery model of old: mainstream products like Pantene shampoo, Häagen-Dazs ice cream, Degree deodorant, Hidden Valley ranch, and Tide laundry detergent delivered to your door in reusable, returnable containers. When you're ready for a new delivery, make your order, leave your empty containers outside your door, and await the arrival of the UPS delivery driver who will bring familiar favorites in an unfamiliar, yet delightfully innovative, new way. Visit LoopStore.com to sign up to be notified when the service launches later this year.     For those who are ready to declutter their cosmetics shelf and create less plastic waste, there's bottle-free shampoo. With a small footprint and no packaging, Lush shampoo bars offer variety and cost savings, as well as space-saving and environmental benefits. Available in several flavors like rose, lavender, citrus, and honey-toffee, each bar-soap-sized puck equals two to three bottles of liquid shampoo—up to 80 washes—and sells for as little as $10.95 per bar. Available at LushUSA.com; from $10.95.       As the market for recycled plastic shrinks, some municipality recycling programs are no longer accepting plastic. If your region still accepts plastic products, chances are it won't process­—and has never processed—plastic toothpaste tubes. Toothpaste tubes are often made out of multiple types of plastic, and coated with remnants of toothpaste, making them difficult to recycle. To eliminate these awkward plastic items from the waste stream, some zero waste advocates make their own dental cleaning solution from baking soda and coconut oil. If the thought of slathering baking soda on your chompers sounds extreme, there's another low-waste alternative: Bite. This up-and-coming brand creates small toothpaste bits—about the size of a tablet of gum—packaged in glass jars. Crunch down on the toothpaste to release the cleaning lather, and brush as normal. Sign up for a subscription, and Bite will deliver another batch to your door, packaged in a compostable bag, whenever you need it. Available at BiteToothpasteBits.com; from $12.       Another bit of plastic that municipal recycling programs won't accept? Plastic cling wrap. If you want to keep this trash out of the landfill, you can ditch food wraps altogether and opt for reusable food storage containers. However, if you aren't ready to say goodbye to the convenience of wrapping leftover produce, marinating meats, or tomorrow's lunch, there's a sustainable solution in Bee's Wrap. This company offers reusable food wraps made of cotton cloth coated in beeswax to create a pliable, bendable, wrappable material that can cover sandwiches, snacks, leftovers, bread, and more. After use, the wrap can be wiped clean, then used again and again. When it finally loses its sticking power, it can be kept out of the landfill and sent to the compost heap. Available at BeesWrap.com; from $6.                                                 They say one man's trash is another man's treasure, and for TerraCycle that expression couldn't be more true. This company recycles all manner of waste types that municipal recycling programs won't accept. Water filters, batteries, pens and markers, broken action figures, cereal bags, cassette tapes, worn plastic lawn furniture, pet bowls, electronic waste, shoes, stuffed animals, flip flops, insulin needles, and much more—all of it can be salvaged, sterilized, and recycled by TerraCycle, funded by like-minded companies. Visit TerraCycle.com to learn about their full range of recycling programs.  

Flip and Tumble

      Give Flip and Tumble's produce bags a chance and you won't go back to using the plastic produce bags available in grocery stores. While plastic bags are prone to ripping, cause food to spoil when transferred to the fridge, and clog your kitchen junk drawer—sturdy, washable and breathable Flip and Tumble bags endure for years and countless uses. Not only do they make life just a little easier, but they're gentle on the environment by eliminating plastic from the waste stream. Available on Amazon; $12 for a set of five bags.       When you think about it, selling soap in packaging doesn't make a ton of sense. After all, if there's any product that doesn't need the sterile protection offered by packaging, it's an item designed to deliver germ-busting cleaning power. Bring a couple bars of Good soap home from the store and rinse before washing your hands to remove any dust that gathered in transit. These bars, available in several scents, last longer than a standard-size bottle of liquid soap and deliver the same cleaning ability. Available at Whole Foods.  

Seventh Generation

      Yes, we're going there! If the entire purpose of a product is to become trash, why should it be made of new materials? Seventh Generation believes that anything that's destined for the trash should be made of recycled materials, thereby reducing waste. That's why all of their paper products like bath tissue, facial tissue, and paper towels are made of 100% recycled paper. Consumers who strive for a plastic-free life will love the varieties of bath tissue that are wrapped in paper packaging instead of the traditional plastic. Visit SeventhGeneration.com to find retailers near you.       Want to dip your toe into the zero waste lifestyle? Look no further than Whole Foods. Say what you want about this health food giant, but the Amazon-owned brand is taking initiative to make healthy eating more affordable and accessible. For waste-free options, head straight to the bulk section to load up on grains, pasta, legumes, dried fruits and nuts, candy, and more. Many stores offer bulk peanut butter, freshly ground coffee, bulk olives and salad bar, on-tap kombucha and freshly squeezed juice. Offerings differ by location. Bring your own bag or jar to capture these fresh ingredients, and be sure to use the on-site scales to record the weight of your container before you fill it. Write this weight (known as the tare) on the jar to let cashiers know how much weight to deduct from your bulk purchase. Visit WholeFoods.com to find a location near you.    

Dr. Bronner's

      America's favorite Castile soap has long been a staple in the hygiene section at health food stores, many of which sell the soap in bulk. Buy a plastic bottle of the stuff once, then return to the store to refill your bottle—or bring your own jar from the start. Visit drbronner.com for store locations.       Ziplock bags generate a lot of plastic waste in homes across the country. Whether you use them to pack lunches, store freezer meals, or marinate dinners, chances are you use them once, then toss them in the bin (most municipalities won't recycle the bags). If you're stuck on these sealable bags, there are several reusable options on the market—including those produced by Full Circle. Available in several sizes, these leak-proof, BPA-free reusable plastic bags can be labeled with a dry erase marker, then wiped clean, and placed in a dishwasher for easy cleaning. Available on Amazon; $13.49 for a set of four bags.       With the rise in minimalist mindsets and environmentally conscious lifestyles, there's been a growth in zero-waste and lower waste grocery stores and outdoor markets. Do some exploring in your hometown to see what options are available to you. To help you on your journey, Zero Waste Home, a free web-based app, provides a directory of grocery stores, markets, and pet stores with bulk foods and zero-waste hygiene products. So go ahead and log on—and happy exploring! Available at Zero Waste Home; free.

Hinged Bottle co-inventor Sebastian Velmont provides an update and report of his first—and highly successful—packaging event ever.   Just 20 minutes into my first packaging tradeshow event ever at WestPack on February 5, 2019, I was blown away by the Evolution of a Package display, a poster of Heinz ketchup packaging over the years that posed the question: what’s next? I hope that my packaging invention might be that next step. By way of explanation, I’m Sebastian Velmont and, along with my brother Rashon, patented a new packaging concept, the Hinged Bottle.   More about that shortly, first you should know that according to research done by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation “despite comprising 13% of the native-born population, African Americans represent just half a percent of U.S.-born innovators.” Innovators are defined as those who own intellectual property, such as patents for their innovative concepts and ideas. Our historical minority innovators include George Washington Carver, who popularized peanut butter and invented hundreds of uses for peanuts, soybeans, pecans, and sweet potatoes including for plastics; and Sarah E. Goode, the first African-American woman to be granted a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, for her invention of a folding cabinet bed. However, within this half a percent of innovations, scant few relate to packaging, the environment, or sustainability, yet African American communities usually are impacted more by the environment than any other community in the U.S, according to a report conducted by Green 2.0. My brother and I are that rare breed of African American Innovators who have received a Utility Patent for an innovation—one we wrote and executed and that was approved without legal assistance. Our invention of a Hinged Bottle that solves a universal problem for consumers when they try to get the "last drop" of lotion or ketchup at the bottom of a bottle.   “Dispensing Container with Interior Access” Patent Number US10,179,675B2 was issued January 15, 2019, along with International Rights to File within 150+ Countries. The feature on this innovation appeared in Packaging Digest in January (see Inventive hinged bottle reduces product waste). Our next plan of attack was finding a way to develop the best prototype to present to consumer product manufacturers for licensing consideration. The one and only place in the packaging industry we considered attending to start our first-hand search for the best resources was WestPack’s Expo in Anaheim, CA, which was held practically in our neighborhood, in February. Masterclass event At the show I met some wonderful connections, learned a lot about where the general industry is and where it is headed. Overall, I received a full educational experience of the Packaging Industry and it was a great, fascinating, eye opening experience. My brother agreed 100%. “WestPack was more than a resource for finding a prototype developer for our innovation, it was an insight into where the packaging industry was headed within every sector of the business,” says Rashon Velmont. “It was a Masterclass for us within the packaging and sustainability space where we received great insight on what industry leaders felt about our innovation and what markets it will best serve. We also met Lisa McTigue Pierce Executive Editor of Packaging Digest, who paid us a great compliment by saying that our innovation was brilliant. “Attending WestPack reassured us of the value of our innovation,” Rashon continues. “Several leading engineers there saw great value in our innovation not only within standard consumer packaging, but also how our concept would serve the new premium consumer packaging industry on the rise. Brands like Pantene, Unilever, The Body Shop and other brands are embracing this new reusable packaging program launched by TerraCycle, Loop.   I watched Lisa's recent video interview with TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky (see Loop and big brands boldly reinvent waste-free packaging, published January 2019), and I believe I found where our innovation will serve a valuable purpose: for premium, refillable packaging that the Loop program encourages manufacturers to design for the Loop platform. Szaky mentioned that the three requirements for Loop packaging is reusable, durable and cleanable. The packaging will consist of innovative types such as stainless-steel shampoo bottles that can be used more than 100 times. The functionality of our patent innovation would allow this bottle to be opened in a way that consumers can access every “last drop” hassle free. The combination of Packaging Digest and WestPack have proven monumental in this development. Information we found at Packaging Digest not only shaped how we were able to develop our innovation before we received the patent, WestPack has become a great resource on how we can license our innovation. Soon we can present it to consumers who seek such a solution to an everyday problem—the timing is perfect for this.   Where do we One Percenters of Sustainability stand now? We have also partnered with Cal Poly Pomona’s Engineering Department in a way that aligns with our mission to close the gap in innovation for women and minorities by encouraging more entrepreneurship in innovation among those groups. This effort was organized by Mariappan “Jawa” Jawaharlal, Ph.D., Professor of Mechanical Engineering, who also co-founded the Femineers (Female Engineers), which the White House recognized for its empowerment of young women to become engineers. We also are honored to work with Stephen Lin, a Cal Poly Pomona engineering student, who will be recreating our Hinged Bottle innovation digitally using a 3D CAD design to properly display and identify the utility patent’s proprietary features. [Ed. Note: both researchers appear along with the Velmont brothers in the above graphic in order of mention.] We’re also seeking consumer product manufacturers that see the value in licensing our "frustration free" innovation to reduce product waste. Lastly for now, we’re excited to see what’s next for us as One Percenters of Sustainability.  

This month’s edition of Business Insights looks at some of the issues surrounding plastics recycling and plastics pollution. In this month’s edition of Business Insights, we discuss a few of the thorny issues surrounding plastics recycling and plastics pollution. This is likely to be the first of a number of newsletters on this topic.

The Anti-plastic Backlash in Response to Very Visible Pollution Problems

Over the past several months in particular, there has been intense media coverage of marine plastic pollution, as well as the various difficulties in recycling plastic effectively, and the consumer product companies’ (brands) and plastics manufacturers’ efforts to counter the backlash and respond to the recycling issues. From the viscerally disturbing images of dead whales with stomachs full of plastic and sea turtles harmed by plastic straws and plastic six-pack rings, to the frequently cited figure that only 9 percent of the plastics that have ever been produced have been recycled, to the increasingly frequent articles and instances of the landfilling or incineration of low-value recycled plastics, a plastics backlash has seemingly emerged that has recently resulted in a number of government bans and corporate pledges to reduce plastic packaging use and/or increase recycled content.

Bans Cropping Up All Over

Plastic bans, most frequently targeting specific items like straws or plastic bags, began on the local level at municipalities of all sizes, but predictably in West Coast cities like Los Angeles and Seattle. In a number of cases, this has prompted (mostly) GOP-led state legislatures in 11 states to pass preemptive laws stopping the local bans. However, more recently, states have gotten into the act, starting, again unsurprisingly, with California banning plastic bags, followed by New York and with several other New England states likely to follow suit. Again, specific items are more often targeted, but recent states’ actions look to take it farther, with intentions to limit single-use plastics and require more recycled content. On a larger scale, the European Parliament is now moving forward aggressively to ban a variety of single-use plastics by 2021 and require more recycled content by 2025.

The Bulk of Marine Plastic Pollution Stems from Southeast Asia

As well intentioned as these actions are, they will not address the root cause of ocean pollution—90 percent of which has been traced to 10 rivers, seven of which are in Southeast Asian countries. Certainly, sizable and growing U.S. consumption and manufacture of plastics is part of the problem, as water and detergent bottles and plastic packaging ends up as litter in these countries, which is washed into the waterways and then into the ocean. It has been estimated that anywhere between 8 million to 12 million tons of plastics per year flow into the ocean. Insufficient and inadequate waste management infrastructure and a lack of anti-dumping regulation in these countries results in so much leakage out of the system and into the land and water. However one feels about landfills, and this will come as an anathema to the zero waste folks, a modern U.S. sanitary landfill is a safe repository for plastic waste, and plastics disposal in the U.S. is not the culprit behind ocean pollution. That said, materials recovery facilities (MRFs) around the country are likely to welcome plastic bag bans (the more the better!), given the havoc they cause to MRF machinery. But, dealing with marine plastics pollution is generally not in the wheelhouse of the domestic solid waste industry.

The U.S. Does Have a Plastic Recycling Issue, If Not a Pollution Issue

That said, the U.S. DOES have a plastics recycling issue. With the 2018 Chinese ban on mixed, post-consumer plastic recyclables and pending bans or tighter restrictions in other export markets such as India and Vietnam, plastics, particularly low-value recycled plastics, have piled up. There have been a number of instances of waivers being granted to diversion mandates to allow for the landfilling of plastics recyclables, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, which was more dependent on export markets. Although there are reasonably robust markets and domestic outlets for HDPE and PET (Nos. 1-2), domestic markets for the lower-value plastics (Nos. 3-7) are tougher to find and there is less processing capacity to handle them. An estimated 65 percent of Nos. 3-7 plastics had been exported to China. This has been exacerbated by the MRFs themselves, which often given their age and current technology, weren’t set up to properly process many plastics, much less the extremely lightweight single-use plastics. As a result, plastics in the recycling stream often end up contaminating other recyclables like fiber bales, or just passing through the MRFs and ending up as residue. More advanced optical sorters and separation, among other technology enhancements, can increase plastic recovery, and industry publications are increasingly reporting on MRF upgrades, despite the relatively poor economics. The MRF economics are compounded by the fact that the use of virgin plastic is often just cheaper, given the low price of natural gas, and more virgin plastic capacity is forecast to come online in the U.S. Extended producer responsibility requirements, which could serve to create markets and spur processing investment, have largely gone nowhere in the U.S. and look unlikely to on a national basis, while the brand companies have fought them vigorously.

The Bad Optics are Forcing Brands into Action

Traditionally, the viable recyclability of their products was not necessarily the brands’ first priority (as the MRF operators often grouse about), but rather cost and looks. Additionally, single-use plastics have been driven by consumer preference and, particularly when concerning food packaging, have a number of positive environmental benefits, including a potential lower overall environmental impact when looked at on a total lifecycle basis. But, that’s a whole other discussion. However, the growing backlash is increasingly driving brands into action, with scores of companies announcing goals to reduce plastic waste, packaging or put more recycled content in their products, including ALDI, Starbucks, Walmart and Nestlé, just to name a few. A consortium of brands, manufacturers and processors have formed the Alliance to End Plastics Waste to encourage recycling, invest in new recycling technologies and promote recycling and waste management infrastructure in Asia to combat ocean pollution. But, some of the goals look to be somewhat “soft” in nature and a number of years out in most cases.

Redesign and Reuse Efforts and Emerging Technologies Are Beginning to Appear

Many contend that the single-use plastic culture has to change to really solve the plastics problem, and Loop, founded by TerraCycle and several brands, aims to reduce waste by setting up a closed loop system of reusable packaging that it is piloting in Paris and New York. Logistics and cost issues would seem to be paramount here, as Loop will provide pickup and cleaning, much less consumer appetite for the idea. Increasingly, there is also talk of using chemical recycling technologies for difficult-to-recycle plastics, such as Renewlogy’s, which just partnered with the Phoenix Public Works Department. But, as with all new technologies, the economics and scalability must be demonstrated. In the meantime, a number of more traditional recycled plastics processors are expanding and trying to take more types of plastic and mixed plastics, like EFS-Plastics, Merlin Plastics and KW Plastics. And of course, as we have previously written, several Chinese companies are investing in plastic processing in the U.S. to pelletize plastic recyclables, which still can be exported to China.

Loop, the circular product and package manufacturing and distribution platform that graced the cover of Packaging World last month was developed by TerraCycle, Inc. and is now supported by two-dozen or so international brand owners.

TerraCycle

Loop

 

 

Tom Szaky has been working on waste since his undergrad days at Princeton in 2001. Then I suddenly heard about him from many sources in the past few months.   His company, TerraCycle, recycles waste others don't. The new initiative, Loop, got attention at Davos and support from many companies whose business plans depend on producing waste, within an economic model that promotes growth. He also published a book, the Future of Packaging, coauthored by top executives from these waste and growth places. I wrote more notes from that book to prepare for this conversation than any book, including Bob Langert's, McDonald's former head of Corporate Social Responsibility (that episode is still being edited).   It never mentioned reducing consumption, twisting, as I saw it, the idea to reducing material per package. Almost no one gets the subtle but critical distinction between efficiency and total waste. Our polluted world is the result of centuries of increasing efficiency and total waste. Nearly every initiative extends that trend, missing that efficiency in a polluting system leads to more efficient pollution.   His book did talk about responsibility, the counter to our system's goal of externalizing costs. So the book missed the most important part of handling waste, reducing supply and demand, but got responsibility. I wondered if he was serious or yet another person confusing feeling like you're reducing waste while increasing it, the way the Watt steam engine did, Uber does, widening roads does, and LED bulbs look on track to.   You'll hear from this conversation that, as best I can tell, he understands the system issues and the need for systemic change. For the rest, listen. He understands and seems to be acting for systemic change.   I hope this conversation is the first of many, not just to hear about his personal challenge, which is pretty big, at least to me. I still eat cheese, about the amount on one pizza slice per year. Actually, it's been decreasing annually. Maybe I'll use his action as inspiration.   I'm glad he got and explained the reasons behind reduction and explained why his book didn't touch it. I've heard enough to believe he understands the most important directions and changes. I don't know enough about the details of Terracycle and Loop to tell if I think they'll work.   It's refreshing to talk to someone who understands the key issues.