The Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC) is happy to announce an offer of financial sponsorships for use of the How2Recycle “Store Drop-off” label! For eligible companies, the How2Recycle License Fee will be offset by these sponsorships. Sponsorships will target high-volume categories of polyethylene-based (HDPE and LDPE) flexible film which include but are not limited to newspaper bags, bread bags, dry cleaning bags and product wraps.
I visit a nearby grocery store about once a week, but up until a few weeks ago I had no idea that I was able to drop off and recycle certain plastic bags there. Throughout the United States there are about 15,000 participating locations such as retail and grocery stores where people can recycle a variety of plastic films. The “Store Drop-off” How2Recycle Label is meant to direct the appropriate recyclable plastic films to these drop-off locations and to keep them out of curbside recycling bins. To find the drop-off site nearest you, visit the Check Locally page of the How2Recycle website.
GreenBlue and the SPC are thrilled to have the support of the Flexible Film Recycling Group (FFRG) of the American Chemistry Council who have generously made this sponsorship possible. The mission of the FFRG is to increase the collection and recycling of flexible plastic films and to educate consumers about the importance of recycling. The FFRG believes the “Store Drop-off” label will convey the ease of recycling this important material at local stores across the country.
Companies that have not yet been licensed under How2Recycle and otherwise meet the eligibility requirements of the program are qualified for a sponsorship. The “Store Drop-off” Label currently appears on the products of several participating How2Recycle companies including Kellogg, Sealed Air, and Seventh Generation.
Interested companies can find more information by visiting http://www.how2recycle.info/. To apply for a sponsorship, send an email to Anne Bedarf, with the subject line “How2Recycle”. Please include the name of your company, reason for interest, and the type(s) of packaging to which the company would apply the label.
Funding is limited for the How2Recycle sponsorships, so claim one for your company before the opportunity runs out!
Author: user
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Top Five Fun Facts: June
Eric DesRoberts continues his monthly series of facts and tidbits he’s uncovered during his research to better understand products and packaging. You can also check out his past Fun Facts.
1. The Environmental Working Group analyzed pesticide tests on 48 popular conventional produce items and found that apples, strawberries, and grapes had the highest pesticide levels and pineapples, onions, and sweet corn had the lowest. The group goes on to say that the health benefits of eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables outweigh the risk of exposure.
2. According to a USGS report, the historical average rate of groundwater depletion in the U.S. was about 9 cubic kilometers per year from 1900-2008. From 2000-2008 the rate of depletion averaged almost 25 cubic kilometers. The full report goes on to state that oceans represent the ultimate sink for essentially all depleted groundwater – US groundwater depletion alone accounts for up to 2.3% of the sea level rise from 2000-2008.
3. Over 40,000 projects have been successfully funded through Kickstarter, raising roughly $536 million. In 2012 alone, 2.2 million people (from 177 countries) contributed over $300 million to fund 18,109 projects.
4. On average, a US family consumes about 5kg of food per day that has cumulatively traveled over 4,000 miles throughout its lifecycle. This ranges from about 700 miles for some beverages to about 13,000 miles for some meats. However, the majority of food impacts still occur in the production stages. Accordingly, a dietary shift away from red meat towards a more fruit and vegetable based diet is one of the most effective ways of reducing a household’s food related climate footprint.
5. June 5 marked the 41st annual United Nations World Environment Day. This year’s theme was Think.Eat.Save – an anti-food waste and food loss campaign to combat the 1.3 billion tonnes of food lost or wasted annually.
A wide gap remains between the general public and the packaging industry when it comes to understanding recyclability terms, especially with plastics and the related Resin Identification Codes. A survey by plastics consultant Moore Recycling Associates is attempting to gauge the public’s current understanding of the terminology that their local community may use, and we encourage everyone to participate.
Moore Recycling Associates and Re-TRAC Connect tell us, “we are working on a project to standardize plastic recycling terminology: both for public education, and for commodity tracking. With your help, our goal is to create a clear, consistent set of terms throughout the recycling chain. The link below will take you to a short online presentation, at the end of which you will have the opportunity to provide your feedback on the proposed terminology. The deadline for feedback is June 11, 2013.”
http://my.brainshark.com/Plastic-Recycling-Terminology-271401132
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Welcome Introduction: Kelly Lahvic
This summer, Kelly Lahvic joins the GreenBlue team as a summer intern. Kelly comes to GreenBlue as a recent graduate of the University of Virginia. Learn more about Kelly in the interview below.
Tell us about your background
I’m from Richmond, Virginia, where my family has lived for over 20 years. About a week ago, I graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.S. in Environmental Sciences and a minor in Global Sustainability. I originally wanted to study engineering, but a class on living simply and sustainably that I took during my first year of college shifted my focus to environmental science.
Why were you interested in working with GreenBlue?
Over the past few months I had interviewed for multiple jobs, and GreenBlue was a company that was different from the rest both on paper and in person. As a small non-profit, GreenBlue was a refreshing change of pace from the typical huge company looking to hire an entry-level college graduate to make copies and take coffee orders. I could tell that GreenBlue practiced what they preached. In fact, the day I interviewed, I wasn’t even sure if the office was open since there were few lights on in the building, as most of the lighting comes from natural light through the windows.
What are you looking forward to in your internship?
I’m looking forward to having an internship where I am able to stay busy with valuable tasks. I am also looking forward to learning a lot throughout the whole process. I’ve only been here for a few days so far and I’ve already learned more about packaging and recycling than I thought possible. All of the work that I’m doing is encouraging me to dig deeper and discover as much as I can about sustainable packaging outside of what I might learn at this internship.
What are your first impressions?
My first impression of GreenBlue came from the employees that work here. Everyone here has been warm, welcoming, and they are all genuinely motivated by what they are working towards with GreenBlue. As I stated before, this is a work environment filled with recycling bins and minimal energy usage; it’s obvious that everyone here cares about sustaining the environment.
Fun facts about yourself?
My parents own a bread company in Richmond, so I will never go hungry! As a result of growing up with a bakery family, I have always loved cooking and baking.
When I was younger my grandparents had a pool, so I learned to swim when I was three years old and have loved doing so ever since. I had a brief moment in the spotlight with one swimming state record, but a fellow teammate beat it in less than a year.
GreenBlue’s Sustainable Packaging Coalition teamed up with Éco Entreprises Québec to develop a brand new web-enabled platform of leading edge design guidance for sustainable packaging. It’s now live on the web at www.sustainablepackdesign.com, and here’s a short overview of the website that was shown at the Packaging Optimization Summit in Toronto on May 15.
The Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s Industry Leadership Committee on Consumer Education and Outreach would like to congratulate our first and second place video contest winners! Their videos were both creative and informative, and we are pleased to share the results.
Industry Leadership Committees bring together members of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition around a topic of interest. This spring, the ILC on Consumer Education and Outreach held a student video contest titled “Grove to Recycler.” Students were challenged with creating videos that communicate the importance and value of packaging in making our world more sustainable, while using orange juice as a theme.
We would also like to thank our anonymous donor for providing the prize money for this contest.
First Place: “Orange Juice and Packaging: A Loop Story” by Tim Dehm
Rochester Institute of Technology
Prize: $3,000
Narrative: “This Flash-made animation was created with the intent to explain, in simple terms, the role of packaging in the life cycle of orange juice, specifically its role beyond what the consumer ordinarily sees.”
Second Place: “Oran-ja Sustainable” by Derek Pincus & Francesca Delle Cese
California Polytechnic State University
Prize: $2,000
Narrative: “Oran-ja Sustainable is a video to show the grove to recycler of orange juice and its packaging while keeping in mind our audience may be of all ages. Therefore our video clearly and simply explains the role of orange juice packaging and if it is not recycled, it can be worth more to the consumer. The polymer coating on orange juice cartons used to provide a strong moisture barrier leads to the carton’s inability to be compatible with some recycling streams in some areas of the country. Our video shows creative ways for consumers to use their orange juice carton for other purposes after use, which is sustainable compared to landfill. We hope our video inspires orange juice consumers to think twice about not only orange juice packaging but other similar paperboard cartons.”
Many thanks to our team members & judges:
Tamal Ghosh, PepsiCo
Julie Kwon, Amcor Rigid Plastics
Steve Mahler, Caraustar
Risa Shapiro, PepsiCo
Tim Rose, Schawk
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Bee populations continue their decline
I love bees. My husband and I started bee-keeping two years ago in Canada to help the local bee population. You may not know it, but bees are an important contributor to our economy. The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service reports that bee pollination provides Americans over $15 billion in increased crop value – about one in three mouthfuls of food in our diet depends on bees. Pollination is one of the “free services” we get from our environment. We take free pollination for granted, and like other nature-provided ecosystem services, including water and air filtration, climate mitigation, soil creation, storm surge buffering, and the provision of natural beauty, we don’t assign a value or cost to them.
I could watch our bees for hours. They are very inspiring. When a bee is born she becomes a hive bee taking care of the brood and cleaning the hive. When she is a bit older she starts foraging. This is heavy work and will eventually kill her in four or five weeks. The queen works hard to keep laying eggs so the colony will have replacement workers. The workforce is very regimented, but each hive has its own flavor. We have six hives all located next to each other, yet the honey is different in each hive. They each seem to have a favorite area to forage. Our bees live on an organic farm surrounded by many other organic farms, so there is a lot to choose from.
I am happy to report all six hives made it through the Canadian winter. Most bees weren’t that lucky. The 2012/2013 Winter Loss Survey by The Bee Informed Partnership, in collaboration with the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), indicated, “On average, U.S. beekeepers lost 45.1% of the colonies in their operation during the winter of 2012/2013. This is a 19.8 point or 78.2% increase in the average operational loss compared to the previous winter (2011/2012), which was estimated at 25.3%.”
Bees are struggling to survive for other reasons, too. Our agricultural practices contribute to the stress on bees, along with a nasty pest called the Varroa mite. Urban sprawl has also reduced the variety and amount of natural food available to the bees. Our large lawns and parking lots do not provide much nourishment. Our industrial system also creates stress for bees. A recent example that has been in the news lately is the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. These are made from nicotine-like compounds and are used to treat seeds. They are absorbed by the plant, making the whole plant toxic to insects. These compounds have been found in honeycomb and in honey. The neonicotinoids act like neurotoxins. The dose from the pollen isn’t enough to kill bees outright, but it weakens and disorients them. Outright bee kills occur in planting season when the treated seeds create a dust as they are being planted that settles on everything. The European Union has recently agreed to a two year restriction on the use of 3 neonicotinoids while further scientific research is conducted.
We can help the bees. We can support local honey producers, plant native plants and wildflowers in our gardens, and ignore the weeds that might be food for bees. Bees love clover; why not encourage it in our lawns? Dandelions are also great bee food. We can measure the decline in commercial honey bee populations, but it is also occurring in native bee populations. If they disappear, the food chain for many species will be affected and other serious ecosystem changes will occur, the effects of which we can’t even predict.
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Taking the Nature Challenge
We’re doing it.
GreenBlue’s Executive Director Nina Goodrich heard about the David Suzuki Foundation’s challenge to spend 30 minutes outside each day in May. Nina said she was interested and asked us to join her. It seemed a perfect fit for a company dedicated to helping businesses achieve sustainability goals, so most of our staff of 17 said, “Yes.”
(It didn’t hurt that those 30 minutes can be used during work hours.)
According to the Foundation website, there are many reasons to spend time in nature: “The more we connect to nature, the smarter, healthier and happier we are,” and “Getting outside even makes us nicer and more likely to clean up the planet.”
If we’ve piqued your interest, look into signing up for the challenge yourself. Better yet, get your coworkers to join you, just like Nina did. Check out the David Suzuki Foundation website for more information and great ideas.
We decided to kick off our nature challenge with a picnic.
There are almost as many plans for how to spend those 30 minutes as there are people taking the challenge. A lot of us plan to walk and garden, others to play disc golf and run. The IT group will have its weekly meetings outdoors. Besides gardening, I know I plan to get reacquainted with my hammock. Many of us are blogging about our experience, so if you’d like, follow our adventures, thoughts and photos. Maybe we’ll all learn something.
http://danielle-daily.tumblr.com/
http://501cit.tumblr.com/
http://ninagreenblue.tumblr.com/
http://keebster776.tumblr.com/
http://ruthannoutside.tumblr.com/
Last week, NPR food blog The Salt published a story on low-sodium claims with a familiar theme: clear and meaningful on-package claims.
On-package sustainability claims are an exciting way to share our work with consumers. The Sustainable Packaging Coalition explores claims through education in the Essentials of Sustainable Packaging course, the Meaningful Marketing Claims Industry Leadership Committee, and the How2Recycle on package recycling label. However, getting the correct message across to consumers can be a challenge.
A study by the University of Toronto showed that on-package claims for low sodium, disease prevention, or lowering blood pressure improved overall consumer perception of a product. The study polled 506 Canadians, one third of which had high blood pressure.
The How2Recycle label is seeing some of the same trends. According to the How2Recycle web survey, 80% of respondents think more positively of companies that participate in How2Recycle. Consumers note appreciation of transparency, use of recyclable materials, and belief that the participating company has broader sustainability motivations.
What I found interesting about this study is that these claims created a halo effect of other health benefits of the product. Not only did consumers have a more positive perception of the product, but some consumers also (incorrectly) equated the claims with improving weight loss, constipation, and diabetes. The article’s final observation is that although companies are reducing sodium, they are weary of advertising for fear of negative consumer perception.
Read more from The Salt, including an article on coffee certification labels.
It’s pretty likely that your company’s sustainability goals do not include a commitment to reducing the amount of eutrophication associated with its activities. In fact, I’m willing to wager that most readers might not even know what eutrophication is. That’s okay. It’s a bit science-y, and it doesn’t elicit half as much response from consumers as, say, carbon footprints and waste generation. For the purposes here, let’s just say that it’s a water quality problem caused by an overabundance of algae, which is caused by excess nutrients introduced by certain emissions. Maintaining good water quality is an important part of sustainability, so in short, eutrophication is a pollution problem that we ought to address.
The typical mentality used to address pollution is to think that it should be prevented at the source. Usually it is advocated that companies should try their very hardest to drive those emissions down to zero, and that usually means awaiting new cleaner technologies. The newer mentality, however, applies the idea that any output, wanted or unwanted, is a resource. This mentality was made famous by the recycling industry and the problem of solid waste generation, but it certainly also rings true for the problem of eutrophication. After all, eutrophication is caused by an overabundance of nutrients, and nutrients are certainly a resource.
To put this mentality into practice, a startup company called Algix is partnering with the University of Georgia and SPC member Kimberly-Clark. Their plan: capture the nutrient-rich water emissions from industry and agriculture, let nature take its course in a controlled environment, and then harvest the algae before releasing the water. Then instead of causing eutrophication problems in our freshwater resources, the algae is used as a feedstock for bioplastic conversion. Pretty neat, huh?
Along with Novomer’s efforts to create plastics from carbon dioxide emissions, it goes to show that “pollution” is an unwanted problem only until we can figure out how to make something out of it. Once the value of eutrophication-causing emissions are understood, your company’s commitment to reducing eutrophication might be a bit easier – and possibly even profitable.
