What's already out there?

Tom's of Maine

Tom's of Maine is a company that supplies oral and personal care products. Maine farms a great amount of potatoes and so what Tom's of Maine is doing is looking into packaging their products using a Bio-plastic that they are attempting to create from using PLA (Polylactic Acid) combined with potatoes that are not sold for consumption. This is a great idea because if this plan works out, Tom's of Maine would be using local resources for it's packaging resulting in less energy needed to transport the potato Bio-plastic to the packing warehouse.

Method

Method is a company that produces sanitary products and has actively put in a serious amount of effort to do its part for the environment. The ocean is one of the biggest casualties of plastic pollution and so what Method have done is organised their team of employees, along with local activists, to sweep the beaches of Hawaii and collect washed up plastic that has polluted the ocean. 

Working with Envision Plastics, the collected plastic waste is then ground down to a grey resin and combined along with other recycled plastic waste which creates a blend that can be reshaped into new soap bottles ready for sale. 

Greenbox Pizza Box

The pizza box packaging is a great innovative design that takes into consideration the material used, practicality of use, the re-use and the disposal. The Greenbox Pizza Box is made from recycled cardboard and is the same shape and size as your conventional pizza box, only with a few extra details. The box lid has perforations that when torn provides the consumer four sections that act as serving plates for the pizza. The rest of the box folds into a smaller box that acts as storage for leftover pizza, fitting into any size fridge/freezer. after the box has served it's purpose the cardboard is 100% compostable, releasing all the resources that made up the box back to the earth and improving the quality of the soil.

in.gredients

in.gredients have become the first package free and zero waste grocery store in the US ...And obviously  this is not going to work for a paint company because there is only so much paint that a person needs, whereas people will need to continually buy food, but it shows a great concept for refilling already used consumer packaging resulting in total sustainability.


Bamboo Bottle Company

The Bamboo Bottle Company have produced a bottle that instead of using plastic uses a glass inner container for the liquid and a bamboo outer shell for protection. The different parts are also held together with a #4 PP plastic components on the ends. Bamboo is a great material as it is strong, protective and most importantly grown from the earth and so of course is disposable back to the earth.

http://www.sustainableisgood.com

What is compostable?

Can I Compost it?

Mushroom Materials

Ecovative is a manufacturer of natural packaging materials made from using mycelium, which is the root structure of mushrooms, and an agricultural bi-product such as corn stalk. Combining these together creates a matrix, which when placed into the mould and left for a few days in a dark will grow self assembling into a solid mass. The growth process is ceased by removing the material from the mould and placing into a heat container, which now makes the mushroom material ready to use. The mushroom material is also 100% compostable and so once the packaging has been used it can be broken down and thrown onto any earth, returning to where it once came replacing all the natural qualities back into the earth.
Ecovative is also able to fine tune the mushroom material to allow the product to be; water absorbent, impact absorbent, flame retardant, vapour retardant, variable density, dielectric, buoyant and much more. Ecovative says that they are cost competitive and that mushroom packaging provides the same standard of protective performance as conventional plastic packaging.

Edward Bulmer Pots of Paint

http://www.edwardbulmer.co.uk/default.aspx?ID=08b19916-eee2-4f0f-a593-9c9286b8eaf5

Bioplastics

Bioplactics are derived from forms of renewable biomass sources such as vegetable fats and oils, starch or microbiota. The beauty of Bioplastic is that it is biodegradable which is a fancy word for being able to add into a compost heap and allowing it to break down in either anaerobic or aerobic environments, releasing its natural make-up back to the earth.

This chart shows the differences in time scale that different materials take to degrade and what the organic make-up of the material is.

The materials that take the longest to degrade are common plastics and glass, which can take from 100 years to over 1000 years to degrade.

What Biodegradable plastic is, is it has been treated perhaps with synthetic polymers which allows them to be easily degraded by micro-organisms and return to nature; but there are a few different options other that synthetic polymers that allow for this to happen.

Application of Bioplastics

Fields of application for bio-plastic materials and products are increasingly steadily. Today, bio-plastics can be found mainly within the following market segmants:

• Packaging
• Food-services
• Agriculture/horticulture
• Consumer electronics
• Automotive
• Consumer goods and household appliances

But there are a lot more markets starting to use bio-plastic materials such as building and construction, household, leisure, or fibre applications (clothing, upholstery).

Products that show vast growth rates are among others bags, catering products, mulching films or food/beverage packaging.

http://eu.european-bioplastics.org/market/applications/

Organic Valley Packaging

Organic Valley Video

PIP Packaging

The Juice brand PIP has been redesigned by design agency, Identica, and is now using a Tetra-Pak carton packaging solution.

Tetra-Pak packaging is a great packaging solution because it uses 70% of it's materials from renuable sources and is working towards 100%.

The production of Tetra-Pak is also to a high standard making all the factory machinery as environmentally friendly as possible.

'Our components, modules and production lines are designed to minimize product losses as well as the use of water, energy and other recourses. We deliver plants with guaranteed performance - guarantees that also cover the promises we make on saving resources.

We can demonstrate that our customers can cut costs and increase profitability while at the same time reducing environmental impact. So it's really all about providing more sustainable business with efficient food processing solutions.'
-http://www.tetrapak.com/uk/environment/envprocessing