Sustainability Science

Mars teams up with Huhtamaki to use recycled plastic for pet food
Confectionery giant Mars has announced plans to use recycled polypropylene plastic into the primary packaging for some of its popular pet food brands.

Nestlé has announced that it will invest up to $3 billion to lead the shift from virgin plastics to food-grade recycled plastics and to accelerate the development of innovative sustainable packaging solutions.

At the Textiles Exchange event being held here in Canada, the two retail giants told delegates how they ran over 8,000 tests on cotton textiles that were randomly collected from recyclers in Europe, finding that over 20 per cent of post-consumer samples contained APEO’s, around 10 per cent of the these samples also contained formaldehydes, with detectable levels of heavy metals, organotins, PAH (polyaromatic hydrocarbons) and phthalates also present. Actual detection rates were not disclosed.

“Recycled materials are key elements in a circular economy. However, increasing the use of recycled materials whilst ensuring that we keep these textiles free of toxic chemicals presents a challenge for the industry,” noted Anna Biverstål, Global Business Expert on Materials at H&M Group.

The two companies hope that other brands and retailers will join their efforts and say that the results will be disclosed freely for the industry to use as they branch out investigations into polyester and wool-rich textiles. 

That little recycling symbol on the bottom of a soda or shampoo bottle has a dirty secret. There’s only a 30 percent chance the PET plastic in the bottle will get turned into a new plastic product, and the chance it will become another soda or shampoo bottle is almost zero.

The French startup, Carbios, hopes to change that with a new enzyme — one that could usher in an entirely new way to recycle plastic, one that actually lives up to the arrows of the symbol.

To shed light on the current state of recycling and to help advance the circular economy, Hi-Cone, a leading manufacturer of beverage multi-packaging solutions, presents its first annual report on The State of Plastic Recycling. Findings of the report show that only one third of adults across four territories reported recycling all of their plastic waste, with over half reporting they found recycling different plastics difficult to understand. Those surveyed also expressed low confidence in the recycling systems in their countries, with over two thirds reporting to believe only 50% or less of what they put into their recycling bins is actually recycled.

Label for Recycling (L4R), the Singaporean not-for-profit organisation will help brand owners to assess the recyclability of their packaging and provide a market proven set of recycling labels for Singapore. In Singapore, packaging represents one third of the domestic waste. Packaging is primarily made of plastic and, as it can be seen below, in the last 15 years, the recycling rate of plastic in Singapore has steadily decreased down to 4 per cent in 2018. 
The difficulty in segregating materials and the high-level of contamination are two of the main reasons explaining this low recycling rate.

Toyota Motor Corp. has started recycling hybrid-vehicle batteries in Thailand, aiming to establish a sustainable process for the power source behind eco-friendly cars and cut costs. The carmaker said at Friday’s launch event it is reusing nickel-metal hydride batteries by utilizing some of them as storage cells for nonvehicular uses, and extracting minerals from them to make brand-new batteries in Japan.

Vehicle tires of course belong on the road, but for the last two decades, they have also increasingly found their way into the road.