Victoria's Blog

Rising Trend in Plastic Coating Cardboard and Paper!

In the last year, I’ve noticed that the number of packaging items which on the face of it look recyclable but have a plastic coating and therefore are probably unrecyclable, has been rising.  This new trend makes the cardboard/paper look glossy but it’s an environmental nightmare! Below are some examples:

Crew Clothing 

Crew Clothing has clearly tried to make their packaging easier to recycle.  The clothes come in a heat-sealed type 4 (LDPE) plastic bag with a postal label directly printed onto the bag.  It’s good to see a company looking at ways to improve their packaging, although it’d be even better if they investigated a paper bag packaging.  Then when you open your postal bag, each item is within an individual type 4 bag (LDPE) which this time haven’t been heat sealed so contain the standard sticky edge to seal the bag.  The sticky edge needs to be cut off, as far as I know, to be able to recycle the bag.  Each item of clothing then has a clothes label attached to the garment and this is an example of the packaging designers not thinking about recyclability…  This appears to be a plastic-coated piece of card as can be seen in the picture below.

TRESPASS

This is another example of a garment label which has been designed to be glossy and might appear to be a glossy bit of card/paper but turns out to be plastic coated paper – although I’m not entirely sure there was any paper at all and it might just have been double sided plastic?

Ubiquiti

Ubiquiti – as much as I love your networking gear, you clearly don’t care about the environment 🙁 There is a multitude of different items and recycling problems with the picture below…

 

To all the companies listed above and every other company (there are another 5 I can think of who I’ve bought items from in the last year that had plastic coated packaging… e.g. Selle Italia [bike saddles], Moon [bike lights]), please, please think about how each item in your packaging will be recycled and where possible use common recyclable materials: paper and cardboard but don’t plastic coat paper/card/cardboard… it might look pretty but how are we supposed to recycle it?  If you’re using vacuumed formed plastic to protect a device (for example), could you have used cardboard?  And please stop putting plastic film over devices to stop them getting scratched… If you absolutely must, use some kind of vegetable-based film that biodegrades.

#RantOver