TERRACYCLE NEWS

ELIMINATING THE IDEA OF WASTE®

Posts with term Suez X

Pilotprojekt: «Beach plastic» wird Shampooflasche - Konsumgüterkonzern P&G will Flaschen mit 25 Prozent Rezyklat aus Meeresabfällen einsetzen

Procter & Gamble (P&G) will Shampoos seiner Marke Head & Shoulders in Flaschen abfüllen, die bis zu 25 Prozent aus recyceltem Kunststoff bestehen, der an Meeresstränden gesammelt wurde. Dies sei eine "Weltneuheit" sagt P&G und kündigte die Markteinführung für diesen Sommer in Frankreich an. Dort soll eine limitierte Auflage der Flasche in der führenden Einzelhandelskette Carrefour erhältlich sein. Dafür sei die weltweit grösste Produktion von Flaschen aus recycelter Strand-Kunststoff nötig. Basis der Zulieferkette für das Ausgangsmaterial sind Freiwillige und Umweltschutzvereine, die den an Stränden angespülten Kunststoff sammeln. P&G arbeitet im Projekt mit dem Recyclingunternehmen TerraCycle und Suez zusammen

We can recycle everything we use, including cigarette butts and toothbrushes. So why don't we?

accessible: individuals and groups, old and young, communities and institutions can participate writes Tom Szaky from World Economic Forum .
When we buy a candy bar, we own the wrapper after the short life of the product; doing something with that branded possession, rather than adding to waste, feels good. Recycling is empowering to consumers and, in the case of traditionally recyclable materials such as glass, paper, rigid plastics and certain metals, economically viable. Recycling not only diverts potentially valuable materials from landfills and incinerators, it also offsets demand for virgin materials, helping to keep carbon in the ground. Recycling aligns human consumption with nature’s activities.
But as human-generated waste streams continue to evolve in diversity and volume, the global community faces the mounting challenge of developing viable recycling and waste management solutions at a comparable pace.
For example, electronic waste is currently the fastest growing solid waste stream, increasing two to three times faster than other waste streams. More broadly, industrial activities currently generate nearly 7.6 billion tons of solid waste in the US each year - that’s 3000% of the total municipal waste generated by Americans annually. As the world enters the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the ecological implications of not prioritizing sustainable resource management are dire.
Economics, not high science, is what determines recyclability: a material is recycled only if one can make money collecting, sorting and recycling it. The environmental and health costs associated with trash are not currently included in the equations. These costs are considered externalities: society as a whole, rather than the manufacturer, retailer or consumer, absorbs those longer-term costs.
Since the costs of not recycling are excluded from the value equation, linear disposal methods, such as land-filling and incineration, are the principle waste management options for most post-consumer waste streams. These linear solutions have come to haunt us: islands of plastic in the Pacific have begun to disintegrate, fish are eating the micro particles and humans eat the fish. Only by emulating nature and implementing the circular economy can humans arrest and, in time, reverse this vicious cycle.
It is unlikely that manufacturers, retailers or consumers will voluntarily take responsibility for the end-life of their waste unless they are required to bear the cost of solutions for the products and packaging they produce, sell or consume. With varying degrees of success, governments across the world are implementing producer responsibility schemes; most of these, including the well known Green Dot programme in Germany, finance the collection of packaging, with much of the waste being incinerated - not much better than land-filling from an environmental perspective. Recycling is the more expensive option, but as the late, great eco-capitalist Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, posted on the side of her company’s trucks said: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
With evident limitations on what governments can or will realistically do, the impetus falls on the private sector. How can we find ways to provide incentives to cover the costs of collecting and recycling?
For the past decade, my company TerraCycle has developed technologies to apply to difficult-to-recycle post-consumer waste streams that usually end up in the trash. Examples are cigarette butts, pens, water filters, used toothbrushes and toothbrush tubes, packaging waste, industrial adhesive containers and even dirty diapers, which have been processed into materials that are used to manufacture new products.
Our R&D team is extremely innovative, but our true innovation is finding reasons for brands and manufacturers to justify paying for recycling when they don’t have to. We have found that recycling has become a sufficient priority for consumers, who patronize brands that enable the recyclability of their products and packaging. We have created business models allowing brands to see that incremental spending on recycling will produce incremental ROI; as a result, many waste streams that were previously unrecyclable are now being recycled.
To achieve scale and generate efficiencies, we recently partnered with SUEZ, one of the largest waste management companies in the world. Through the deal, SUEZ can bring TerraCycle’s consumer-facing programmes to its customers in France, the UK, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden, and we gain access to perhaps the world’s largest sales force dedicated to the circular economy.
Recyclability is among the top purchase drivers for a range of consumer products and consumers around the world today have demonstrated a willingness to pay a premium for sustainable goods and services. We’ve demonstrated that sponsoring recycling can be a pathway to migrate a company’s post-consumer products and packaging from the linear economy to circular economy.
While I’m proud of our accomplishments, there remains a huge values-action disparity, or “green-gap,” where changes in consumer attitudes have not yet translated to changes in action. Recycling rates have stagnated in the last decade in relation to the volume of waste produced globally, and while many countries in the developing world work without a formal recycling system, the US still only recycles about 34% of its trash.
Recycling almost everything we use is already possible. Consumer buying power, with the right social and political commitments, can drive demand for comprehensive recycling solutions at multiple levels. The scale of the world’s waste problem mandates that everyone in the consumption cycle act together to work towards regenerative, circular solutions that bridge the gap to zero waste.

Will a Trump Administration Affect TerraCycle?

Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, I was catching up with some colleagues at TerraCycle HQ in Trenton. The conversation turned to then President-elect Donald J. Trump. The topic was centered on the question of how the new administration would affect environmental policy and global action plans for sustainability. More specifically, how would a Trump presidency affect TerraCycle?
Given the environmental platform that the current president campaigned on last year, it was clear that, if elected, a President Trump would significantly alter the direction taken by the previous Administration. One pre-election promise was the cancellation or renegotiation of the United States’ participation in the Paris Agreement, a global climate change deal hinging on increased regulations for the reduction of carbon emissions. Another was the eradication of the Clean Power Plan, which regulates emissions from power plants.
In less than a month since President Trump took office, there have been reports of EPA employees being banned from giving social media updates, speaking with press and interacting with Congress and public amid the grants and contracts freeze. Actions taken with regards to advancing the Dakota Access and Keystone Pipelines by executive order signal the possibility of expanded support for U.S. dependence on fossil fuels for domestic energy production.
That TerraCycle is an environmentally-minded company on a mission to move away from the linear ‘take-make-dispose’ way of doing things in favor of more circular and/or sustainable production systems, might question how TerraCycle would operate under the new direction favored by this Administration.
So will a Trump presidency negatively affect TerraCycle? The deep irony is that the answer is ‘No.’
The services TerraCycle offers are built to circumvent and address the economic and structural limitations of currently inefficient public waste management systems. As it stands in the U.S. and most countries around the world, public works sees most “waste” outputs falling outside the scope of recyclability (aka resource recovery), tracking them for landfilling or incineration. This is because the value of most items cannot be sold on back-end channels for more than the cost of collection, logistics and processing in these publicly funded systems, providing no economic incentive to recycle them because of the lack of profit.
However, a report from the World Economic Forum and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation finds that since most plastic packaging is used only once, 95 percent of the value of plastic packaging material, worth $80-120 billion annually, is lost to the economy. The current value system may not view recycling as a profitable business, but the fact is, not recycling is wasting money.

Dell Packaging Made From Recycled Ocean Plastics, an IT Industry First

Dell is the latest company to turn ocean plastics into new products and packaging as businesses increasingly address the problem of plastic waste — and see potential in creating circular supply chains and using recycled materials. Dell today said it has developed the technology industry’s first packaging trays made with 25 percent recycled ocean plastic content. It is part of Dell’s goal of 100 percent sustainable packaging by 2020 and is a response to the growing environmental problem of plastics in the oceans. It also follows a slate of recent announcements from companies turning ocean plastics into new products and packaging. Last month Procter & Gamble, in partnership with recycling and environmental management companies TerraCycle and Suez, developed the world’s first recyclable shampoo bottle made from up to 25 percent recycled beach plastic. Also in January Unilever CEO Paul Polman called on the consumer goods industry to address ocean plastic waste and employ circular economy models to increase plastic recycling rates. Additionally, Adidas is working to solve the problem of plastic pollution in oceans by turning this waste stream into new material for its shoes. Dell’s new packaging consists of recycled plastics collected from waterways and beaches. The company will start shipping its new laptop in the ocean plastics packaging on April 30. In 2017, Dell says its ocean plastics pilot will keep 16,000 pounds of plastic from entering the ocean. Additionally, each tray will be stamped with the No. 2 recycling symbol, designating it as HDPE, which is commonly recyclable in many locations. Dell’s packaging team designs and sources its product packaging to be more than 93 percent recyclable by weight so that it can be reused as part of the circular economy. The ocean plastics supply chain process works like this: Dell’s partners intercept ocean plastics at the source in waterways, shorelines and beaches before it reaches the ocean. It then processes and refines the used plastics, mixes the ocean plastic (25 percent) with other recycled HDPE plastics (the remaining 75 percent) from sources like bottles and food storage containers. Finally, it molds the resulting recycled plastic flake into new packaging trays and ship the trays for final packaging and customer delivery. Dell’s pilot program, which the company says is also an industry-first, follows a successful feasibility study launched March 2016 in Haiti.