Oh, hell, and I was going to vote for them as well (Martin)
The Liberal Democrats have pledged to target “excess packaging” in their manifesto this morning, after all three major parties promised a move towards a 'zero-waste' Britain.
The Lib Dems were the only one of the three major parties to explicitly mention packaging in their [...]
There is a whole raft of terms that cause confusion (see the piece below) – oxodegradeable, degradeable, biodegradeable and compostable mean different things, and is it, for example, reasonable to describe something as ‘compostable’ when it requires an expert eye to identify the plastic in the first place and then an industrial composter rather than [...]
This is good news – as long as you’re a metal or glass producer, less good for the plastics sector, I suspect. For me, it all depends how deep they are going to go when they consider Carbon issues. There is a mind-boggling complexity at work – for example, how do bioplastics fare, when you [...]
Not sure what to think of this. Under the chairmanship of John Turner the committee produced one of the best, most well-balanced publications on packaging that I have seen, but they are a committee of only ten people, covering the whole industry – apart from the Chairman, there are two people representing raw material producers [...]
And again – compliance ain’t hard, but it needs to be considered. I wonder whether packaging manufacturers ought to be doing more to advise their customers. After all, they live in the industry, while the poor product manufacturer is focused on his own business. For example, GHD, the hair straightener people, were fined £9000. They [...]
The European Commission is to provide extensive guidelines as to what defines packaging under its Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive.
The directive requires packaging producers to pay towards the cost of recycling.
Under Article 3(1) of the directive packaging is defined as “all products made of any materials of any nature to be used for the containment, [...]
I’ve just seen a press release from the Local Government Association (yes, them again) that tells me that the possible cost of the Christmas clear up is as much as £78 million over the normal cost of waste disposal. That’s 230,000 tonnes of waste food, 10,000 tonnes of wrapping paper, 25,000 tonnes of packaging and [...]
ISO are holding meetings in Sweden today and tomorrow involving around 70 packaging industry leaders from all over the world, with the aim of developing a meaningful standard for Sustainable Packaging (ref: Packaging Digest et al).
It looks as though there will be six standards: source reduction, reuse, recycling, energy recovery, chemical recovery, composting and biodegradation.
A [...]
I actually think the politics is going in the right direction here. In the packaging industry, we shouldn’t be frightened of a focus on waste, in fact we should welcome it. Change is inevitable, and I’m sure some of the secondary packaging companies will have to look out if they can’t realign their businesses but, [...]
I have a great deal of respect for Hillary Benn. He’s saying and doing the right things, he isn’t just following a populist green agenda, he’s maintaining pressure on industry and aiming at the right targets. Of course we must recycle more, value our resources. Much, much more sensible approach than the cretinous attacks on [...]
