Nonprofit Offers Single-Use ‘Plastic Surgery’ To Festival-Goers

Fortenova Group’s Croatian water bottling company Jamnica has introduced 100% recycled PET (rPET) made 0.5l bottle for its still mineral water brand, Jana natural. The climate-friendly packaging solution has been developed together with plastic manufacturer ALPLA using plastic from the post-consumer recycling cycle. ALPLA Multi-Country manager Balkan/Adria Primoz Agrez said: “The new 0.5l Jana bottle made entirely of highest quality bottle grade recycled PET from one of our close ALPLA recycling plants is an outstanding result of this joint initiative.”

UK-based Berry bpi will break ground on a recycling facility in Leamington next month, which will produce certified FDA post-consumer recycled polypropylene for use in packaging. The new facility will not only recycle used plastics, but it will also wash, sort, and sift them to produce food-grade materials with a target purity standard of 99.9 per cent. CleanStream, Berry’s proprietary process, is a closed-loop system to mechanically process domestically recovered household waste PP back into consumer packaging. The company claims that the facility will pave the way for the future of rPP packaging using automated sorting processes, integrating online sensor technologies and machine learning algorithms to separate PP containers, tubs and trays.

When he was 16, Eric Lundgren saw a landfill near his small hometown in northwest Washington, filled with brand-new products. Ever since, he’s been building businesses that try to stand between people and their most wasteful instincts. He started an electronics recycling company at 16. He went to prison trying to restore Windows on refurbished computers. He loaded up a junked BMW with used batteries to win a Guinness record for the longest single-charge electric vehicle drive, to make a point.  Now Lundgren is converting big, still-usable batteries from electric vehicles (EV) into backups for solar grids and other uses. If people aren’t going to use what’s right in front of them, he and his more than 100 employees will just have to do it for them. After our CEO Kyle Wiens toured the BigBattery plant in Chatsworth, Calif., and I talked to Lundgren about battery recovery, we came away with a whole new perspective on what you can do with a “used” EV battery.

What was considered as a good to have, is increasingly becoming a must have. And this rings true for organizations across the globe, especially as the conversation around topics such as sustainability, circular economy, and ESG metrices are gaining steam. Governments, environmental agencies, industry associations, among many others, are all moving to tackle this new reality of depleting resources, coupled with climate crisis, that we are faced with today. Everybody is thinking about it. Everybody is talking about it. Many are even doing something about it. What is missing, however, is bringing them all at the same table, says Dr. Trevor Thornton, a senior lecturer at Australia’s Deakin University. In an insightful conversation with Kamal Raj, who leads Solid Waste Management as part of the Green Initiatives team at Infosys, discussed with Thornton a range of topics from waste management, to circular economy. “It was Carl Sagan that said that waste is stuff that we are too stupid to use,” says Thornton, who believes that people across sections of the ecosystem, such as governments, businesses, industry associations and conservationists should work together to figure out how to actually manage waste better. “It was Carl Sagan that said that waste is stuff that we’re too stupid to use.” Thornton, who teaches at the Faculty of Science Engineering & Built Environment, School of Life & Environment Sciences, believes that at an organizational front some companies are looking at the aspect of circularity, and are realizing that this is the way of the future. “Some companies are saying that, yes, there is that environmental and social aspect of doing things. But they’re also realistic to know that there’s the economic benefits associated with it,” he says, adding that they are starting to use the principles of circular economy, and some are even entering…