In a major redesign of its marinade product line, Goya Foods, which is the largest Hispanic-owned U.S. food company and a leading supplier of Latin American food and condiments, has converted its 12oz (355ml) and 24.5oz (725ml) marinade bottles from glass to polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles supplied by Amcor Rigid Plastics.

Switching from glass (left) bottles to PET plastics bottles, Goya Foods gained many advantages, including substantially reduced environmental impact.

Amcor’s LatinAmerica group designed the hot-fill bottles, including a new shrink-wrap label, and the result is a vibrant, clean package that is at once modern and elegant. Apart from the visual appeal, Amcor’s press release notes other benefits: “The hot fill bottle delivers significant performance and cost advantages including portability, reduced breakage, and light weight, along with sustainability benefits such as recyclability, reduced transportation costs, and a significantly reduced carbon footprint.

During the last 70 or so years that plastics have been replacing glass — and metals, paper, and fabrics — the replacement decision was generally not based on any single plastics advantage. One benefit often was cited as the key factor, but virtually always, it was a combination of benefits that spurred the change, as it is with Goya’s decision on these bottles.

Goya is realizing substantial environmental benefits by changing the  bottles from glass to plastics. Amcor says using PET in the 24.5oz bottle results in a reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of 61.4%, compared with glass. Additionally, using PET means 52% more 24.5oz bottles are in a truckload, which eliminates still more GHG. Such environmental benefits may vary in quantity but  generally they are typical when plastics replace other materials, a fact that environmental activists and groups should appreciate, or at least notice.

“In the end, lightweight PET not only delivered a major savings in terms of freight cost but also gave us the glass-like appearance and the shelf appeal to maintain our brand image,” said Joseph Perez, senior vice president of Goya Foods. Both bottle sizes are custom designed for both ambient fill (up to 140°F) and hot fill (up to 185°F) applications and are seamlessly integrated into existing glass filling lines with minimal adjustment, according to Perez.

Goya Foods, which offers more that 2,200 Latin American food products, also plans to replace glass with PET in an existing 12oz juice beverage line. Perez said the conversion to hot fill PET is expected by the summer.

The new Goya PET bottles are the first to feature Amcor’s new Origami hot-fill technology, incorporating six flat panels to counteract vacuum that occurs in hot filled containers and to maintain structural strength and integrity. The flat surfaces enhance gripping and consumer handling.

Subway’s new catering tray is 95% recycled PET soda and water bottles.

On April 22^nd, the Subway restaurant chain announced another step in its commitment to making its operations more environmentally responsible. Its newly introduced catering trays are made from 95% post-consumer recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic. Subway (Milford, CT) estimates this change will keep about 1.8 million pounds of plastic material from entering the waste stream each year.

Each tray and lid use PET material equivalent to about 19 20-ounce PET soda or water bottles, and Subway notes that the trays and lids can be recycled in commercial recycling facilities. “We have made a commitment to look at every facet of our day-to-day operations in order to make our restaurants more environmentally responsible,” said Elizabeth Stewart, Subway’s marketing director, who also oversees the brand’s Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives.

In April of 2012, Subway announced that it was using new salad bowls, also made of 95% post-consumer-recycled (PCR) plastic, predominately from PET soda and water bottles. That, said Subway, would keep about 2.62 million pounds of plastics from going into landfills. To give that large number some perspective, when Subway announced the new salad bowls a year ago it had more than 36,000 locations worldwide. Today its website shows that number has risen to 39,263 restaurants in 102 countries.

Last year Subway began using salad bowls made of post-consumer recycled PET plastic material.

Subway says that both the salad bowls and the new catering trays, were created by Pactiv (Lake Forest, IL), which has 55 facilities in seven countries and says it’s the world’s largest manufacturer of food service items and packaging. Pactiv purchases post-consumer PET bottles, which it recycles and uses to manufacture the salad bowls and lids and the catering trays.

The recycling of PET trays and other thermoformed products has not been as widespread as PET bottle recycling, but it has been growing as more thermoformed PET products have gone to market.

To help accelerate the growth of recycling thermoformed PET, SPI: The Plastics Industry Trade Association and NAPCOR, the National Association for PET Container Resources, last year awarded three grants to companies in Maryland, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania to help them establish model programs for collection and intermediate processing of thermoformed PET packaging.

Who might think plastic bread bag closures would make a lovely wedding dress? The bride, that’s who.
© Constructing Nadine 

Though it’s increasingly clear that there is no end to the ways plastics can be reduced, reused and recycled, and that all those ways show creativity, transforming something as ordinary as the small plastic tabs that keep plastic bread bags closed into a wedding dress merits closer inspection.

Credit the idea, the design, and the making of the dress to Stephanie Watson, a fashion designer living in Trentham, Australia, a bit northwest of Melbourne. For this assignment, she also was the client, the bride. The dress became a ten-year project for her, starting when she and her boyfriend, now her husband, Will Wapling got together. The collecting of bread tags, as they are called in Australia, was soon underway.

© Constructing Nadine

Watson said it was just a joke at the start, but people started collecting them for her and they began filling jars, and then larger jars. Even so, ten years and thousands of tags later, there still were not enough to make the dress, which by then had been given a name, Nadine. To the rescue came Wapling’s cousin, a baker, who donated enough rolls of the plastic tags to get the job done.

Watson then was able to direct her design and sewing skills into making the idea a reality. Though the cost of the dress is said to be about AUD$36, Watson estimates that she invested more than 300 hours into its design and creation, including sewing ten thousand plastic tags to the lining in a way that the stitches didn’t show.

Overlapping the bread tags hides the stitching.

© Constructing Nadine

 

 

 

Watson told the local newspaper, “I just didn’t want to have a normal wedding gown.” Mission accomplished, to say the least, but the critical question has to be, how did the dress work out on the big day?

In her blog she says it was a bit uncomfortable. Small and light as bread tags are, ten thousand weigh about 15 pounds, and are not very flexible. That caused Watson to be a bit concerned about taking a tumble, but she held tightly onto Wapling and the big day went according to plan. In the photos, the groom seems pleased to be held onto.

One ongoing, often heated, controversy is always simmering, and sometimes boiling over: Is using land for production of bioplastics feedstock at odds with the increasing demand for food associated with the growing global population? Conspicuously lacking has been good data showing how much of global agricultural land is needed for bioplastics—until now, that is.

The industry association European Bioplastics (Berlin, Germany), using numbers from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and calculations done by the Institute for Bioplastics and Biocomposites (IfBB, University of Hannover, Germany) yesterday published a brochure called “Bioplastics — facts and figures” aimed at moving the discussion to a factual level.

The first sentence of the association’s press release points out the key finding of the study: “The surface required to grow sufficient feedstock for today’s bioplastic production is less than 0.006 percent of the global agricultural area of 5 billion hectares.” The earth’s total land area is about 13.4 billion hectares.

The study reports that 70 percent of the global agricultural area is pasture for animals. The remaining 30 percent is divided into land growing crops for food and animal feed (27%), land given over to crops for materials, including bioplastics (2%), and land growing crops for biofuels (1%).

European Plastics’ market data states there was 1.2 million metric tons of bioplastic production capacity in 2011, which translates to about 300,000 hectares of land used to grow the feedstock. That is 0.006 percent of the 5 billion hectares of our planet’s arable land. Looking forward, the association’s projection for bioplastics capacity in 2016 would require 1.1 million hectares for feedstock, or 0.022 percent of the globe’s arable land.

The association says that the percent of land used to make bioplastics is “…nowhere near being in competition with the 98 percent used for pastures and to grow food and feed.” European Bioplastics adds that increasing the efficiency of feedstock and agricultural technology will be key to assuring the balance between land for innovative bioplastics and land for food and feed.

The chart below illustrating the data is from the brochure.

Boyan Slat, an aerospace engineering student at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, began searching two years ago for a way to remove plastic marine litter from the world’s oceans. He was 17 then and now he has a potential solution called the Ocean Cleanup Array.

The platforms that collect and hold the surface plastic are anchored to the ocean floor.

The Array would consist of 24 floating platforms anchored to the ocean floor around the periphery of the five ocean gyres that contain most of the surface plastic debris. Taking advantage of the natural movement of the gyres, long booms attached to the platforms would serve as large funnels to direct the plastic debris into the platform, which then would filter the plastic, separating the water and marine life.

The plastic would be held in a collection bin until at some point it would be taken to land where it could be sold for recycling. Though it’s unlikely the system could remove all the plastic pieces, Slat and the system’s designers think it can remove a major portion of the estimated 7.25 billion kg (15.98 billion lb) of surface material.

Long booms let ocean currents funnel surface plastics into the manta-shaped platform.

If it works it will take considerable time. Tracking studies have found that the rotational cycle of the gyres is about five years, and that is variable because it’s driven by the ocean winds. A major point in Slat’s thinking is, why try a solution involving some device or ship moving across the ocean when letting the oceans move the plastics to the stationary collectors could save money, labor, and emissions.

Slat says the manta-shaped platforms will be self-supporting, drawing energy from sources such as the sun, currents, and waves. He also says that selling the recovered plastic for recycling would make more money than the cost of the entire operation — it could be profitable.

Slat’s website says that, currently, the project is urgently seeking hydrodynamic/fluid dynamics modelers, process engineers, maritime structure engineers, experienced users of MATLAB, the fourth generation programming language, and plankton biologists. And as you would expect, the project is searching for funding of its further development.

Boyan Slat, 19, of Delft, The Netherlands

Slat recently has added a statement to his website after seeing several articles stating the Ocean Cleanup Array is a feasible method of collecting plastics from the five ocean gyres. That, he says, is incorrect.

Even though preliminary results look promising, Slat says the 50-person team is only about a quarter of

the way toward completing its feasibility study. However, it is making good progress and he advises us to stay tuned, as the results of the study will be published online in “several months time.” Born in 1994, this talented young man may not yet be 20 when the study results are posted — not that it matters.