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
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