|
|
| Home › Articles › Here |
|
|
|||||||
| By: Nick Howard | Date: August 2019 | Contact the Author | ||||||||
|
Standing outside my
local coffee shop, I’m
staring at a row of
trash bins, each emblazoned
with signs.
One reads garbage, another, recycle,
while a third says paper. Just as millions
of people, I struggle to figure
out which bin or bins my lunch
packaging should go into. Even
more annoying, some of my trash is
made up of a combination of materials.
I feel like a picker at Amazon,
ripping apart various bits of my
packaging and tossing it into various
orifices. This is just stupid. Recycling is in the cross hairs today and, over the last 12 months, has been heating up to a point where climate change shares top billing with our growing trash problem. Mountains of articles with a governmental focus are picking up steam, looking for a solution. The answer seems rather obvious from where I stand. Yes, the use of single-use plastics is a concern but banning straws is only a small part of a larger problem. Paper, as all printers know, has an easy way to be reused. Mixed (coated or other processes such as glue) are sorted and separated from uncoated, and the filled bins can be routinely hauled away by paper recyclers. Because these are already pre-separated, the process is easy. Glass and metals have the same easy process of being returning to recyclers who have a simple task of crushing the glass or filtering the various metals. Nothing can be as simple as isolating steel cans from aluminum — besides there is a ready buyer for these materials. The common sense approach to plastic should be made the same. The problem is, a good many packaging products are made up of a combination of paper, plastic and metals. This can be fixed by encouraging the printing industry to develop new cellulose materials that can make packaging homogeneous. Since plastics were invented back in 1862, we sought a way to produce a product that could outlast everything else found in nature. There remains good reasons for this. If you live near bodies of water or in a four-seasons climate, having window frames that don’t rot or rust makes a good deal of sense. Plastic piping, such as ABS, is lighter and is used for everything from high voltage wires to drain and water pipes — none of these do you want to habitually replace. But currently there is no incentive for plastics to be recycled the same way as paper, metal and glass.
Too many trash cans are part of the problem Try and find a trash can in Japan. I once grew annoyed when I simply could not find a container on a busy street in Tokyo to toss a coffee cup. That is, until I realized the less trash cans there are, the more effort we put into finding a proper place to dispose of refuse. This is unlike Canada where some communities go out of their way to spread millions of containers all over our cities and towns — and to great taxpayer expense. These containers are jammed full of everything from waste paper to dog feces, and someone has to sort it. Tax dollars spent picking up all over the place and sorting materials is a waste of our hard-earned money. Countries such as Japan are excellent examples of intelligent management. There is money in trash, and not just picking up and filling our landfills or reaping subsidies to sort through the stuff. Look at metals, cars and smaller items, such as batteries. All have value with simple routes back to the industry. Not so with plastic. Canadian firm EPI has developed an OXO-Biodegradable compound called TDPA™ (Totally Degradable Plastic Additive). This compound is now being used in shopping bags and based on a modified formula called Polyactide Aliphatic Copolymer. The bag is designed to biodegrade in weeks. Soon, materials of this type will be used in other products. Another product is CPLA, which features a sugar such as corn- or beet-based renewable bio-waste polylactic acid, that is now being used to manufacture lids and cups. These are good things no doubt, and there is the additional benefit to homogeneous packaging that can also be printed. Biodegradable anything is part of the recycling solution too. Some suggestions:
The missing link in recycling is plastic. Photos that show oceans and rivers full of plastic bottles and non-biodegradable trash scream now is the time to make it easy to return plastic to be recycled, ground up and used again. If we do that and not use our tax dollars to pay a subsidized sorter, not only can the world eradicate plastic waste, we can also reduce our dependence on plastic’s main ingredient — oil. The print industry has been handed a golden opportunity to showcase how the use of 100-percent paper-based packaging makes good sense for the planet. I don’t want to stand there stripping bits of my trash to be placed in a jumble of bins. A coffee cup and lid should match! The landfill only gets biodegradable organic waste. As kids, we would rummage through ditches and parks looking for glass soda bottles because they had a cash return credit. With metals – especially aluminum cans – inner-city poor still collect and return these to a metal recycler for cash. That’s because metal has value. Now, it is plastic’s turn to be easily recycled. Meanwhile packaging designers should see a problem for which they can devise a solution. |
||||||||
| Contact the Author | ||||||||
