I was pleased to hear recently that Enval has secured new funding for their laminate recycling technology. It seems crazy that expensive aluminium ends up going to landfill and so a solution that can recover this valuable material certainly gets my vote.
It also adds another pack type to the ‘possible to recycle’ list, and a flexible one at that – helping to show that it’s not just the rigid pack types that can play the recycling game. It’ll be a while before there’s a significant amount of post-consumer laminate waste being recovered in this way, but that’s no reason not to celebrate a start to the process.
In the UK stand-up pouches are a core user of alu/plastic laminate. Euromonitor estimates that there were just over 3 billion alu/plastic pouches sold through retail in the UK in 2011. Wet cat food has been the main driver for this growth, driven by the convenience of a single serve pouch over a traditional metal can and strong marketing support. In addition, pouches have been popping up all over the place recently so there’ll be plenty of material to feed Enval’s process in the years ahead.
And in the meantime there’s TerraCycle, who have teamed up with Kenco to recycle their eco-pouches into pots and pavers, or up-cycle into bags and pencil cases.
Companies like this that strive to find a solution to packaging waste should be what we hear about in the national press. Unfortunately poorly thought through comments on how many times you could fill Big Ben with packaging waste are knocking these stories off the front pages. If parliament is to be filled with rubbish, Big Ben is the wrong place to start.
Ben Punchard has recently joined Mintel after spending several years at Euromonitor
———————————————
If you would like to write a Soap Box, we’d love to hear from you. Just email your idea to pn.editors@metropolis.co.uk and we will get back to you.
Loading ...
Comments are closed.