A sincere thank-you goes to the folks at BagTheBan.com for producing a brief, easy to read infographic that clearly shows how and why plastic bags are a better choice than paper or reusable shopping bags—for the environment, the economy, and the place where you live.

It’s called The Truth About Plastic Bags, and it lives up to its name with factual, quantitative information on plastic bags relative to litter, source material, recyclability (spoiler alert: 100% recyclable), access to bag recycling, environmental impact (see below), negative impacts of bag bans on retail businesses, and more.

The colorful, multipage infographic is available as a free PDF download that can be easily reprinted and handed to those who mistakenly believe plastic bags make the worst choice when the truth is the exact opposite. Facts are facts.

You can see a sample from The Truth About Plastic Bags below, and you can see it in full and download it here. For more information on plastic bags, visit BagTheBan.com, which is presented by Hilex Poly, a leader in plastic bag recycling and manufacturing.

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.

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.

A couple of reports showing real progress in recycling rigid plastics other than bottles came as good news when they were released Tuesday to attendees at the Plastics Recycling Conference in New Orleans.

The first report shows that recycling of rigid plastics, excluding bottles, increased 13 percent in 2011, growing to at least 934 million pounds. The second report revels that the share of U.S. consumers with local access to recycling all non-bottle rigid plastics jumped from 40 percent in 2011 to 57% in 2012.

Two reports show that more rigid plastic is being accepted, and more of it is being recycled.

Both reports are based on extensive survey work done by Moore Recycling Associates (Sonoma, CA) on behalf of the American Chemistry Council (ACC, Washington, D.C.). The first report, “2011 National Postconsumer Non-Bottle Rigid Plastic Recycling Report,” has another piece of good news: In 2011, 61 percent of rigid plastics collected in the United States were recycled in the United States or Canada. When Moore Recycling began studying rigid plastics collection in 2007, just over a third of the collected material was recycled in North America.

Also according to the report, polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene (PE) together make up the largest share (70 percent) of the non-bottle postconsumer rigid plastics collected in the U.S., with PP at 39 percent and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) being 31 percent.

A key factor in the recent growth of rigid plastics recycling has been a substantial increase in the number of communities collecting many types of rigid plastics in addition to bottles. The second report, “Plastic Recycling Collection: National Reach Study, 2012 Update,” found that more than 1,400 cities and 300 counties in the United States now collect all rigid plastic containers, in addition to plastic bottles.

The consumer access report also showed that the portion of

U.S. consumers with access to recycle two key categories of rigid containers—HDPE rigid cups, tubs and containers, and PET trays, clamshells and cups—now exceeds 60 percent. This marks the first time that, under the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines, recycling access is sufficiently widespread to label these containers “recyclable” without the need for additional qualification or disclaimer.

ACC pointed out that, within the Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s How2Recycle label system, HDPE and PET containers have surpassed the “Limited Recycling/Check Locally” category and now meet criteria for the “Widely Recycled” category. According to the report, rigid polypropylene containers are the next likely class of rigid plastics to approach FTC’s “recyclability” threshold with 58.4 percent of U.S. consumers currently able to recycle these items locally.

We still have much to do to make recycling widely accepted and practiced, but progress is being made.