Over the past year, there has been a huge push for reduced consumption of single use plastic packaging for good reason. The increased consumption by humans for single use plastics has caused the world’s environment to be greatly impacted. Almost everyday you can peruse the internet and other forms of media and find a piece where the outcome of single use plastics is causing great danger to humans, animals, and ecology.
Single use plastic packaging is the epitome of the packaging conundrum. Companies want to use materials with properties that protect their product at minimum cost. The answer for past decades has been to use plastics because of their flexibility.
In theory, certain companies thought using plastic would be great for the consumer because of it’s utility, function, and convenience. In reality, that is not the case. A lot of single use plastic packaging is compromised of multiple types of polymers or substrates that make it hard to recover when recycled.
Another big issue with single use plastics is the consumer is not educated on how to properly recycle plastics. To put it bluntly: Some people do not care and are irresponsible! The result is a lot of single use plastics disposed that inevitably will end up in a landfill, body of water, or incinerator. Or the most common misnomer for people is to litter, making the landscape of the earth scattered with plastics everywhere!
Single use plastics can be found in almost every country of the world. The most “advanced” countries as well as developing countries possess it. Advanced countries have recycling or collecting stations to recover it. Even with these capabilities not all people follow proper disposal instructions. Other countries do not have the capability to do so. For example; in South East Asia street food vendors place everything in single use plastic packaging. The streets in cities as well as rural areas are speckled with plastic.
Lately, there has been a push to ban single use water bottles, plastic bags, and straws. The above cases support the rationale to do so. The question asked though is why only these items?
A good example are twist ties used to secure plastic bags to protect bread/trash, bunch produce, keep electrical cables in place, bike tubes compact. The list of uses is endless! The majority of twist ties are impossible to recycle because metal is placed wire in between layers of coated paper, plastic, or rubber. Using multiple materials makes it difficult to recycle. The only thing that can be done is to be reused; most consumers do not.
There are alternatives to the twist ties like the 100% paper based “twist tie” that can be recycled and may reduce waste. Other alternatives are utilizing materials that do not have such a great impact on the environment or using excess material that can be recycled.
Some drawbacks of using these alternatives are changes to manufacturing processes, equipment, and processes that may or may not lead to increased costs. Regardless of the outcome businesses and humans should be taking a more responsible approach to use and proper disposal of packaging.
Contact Pack Protocols LLC if you or your business needs support with packaging sustainability projects such as assessments, evaluations, or improvements.