Microplastics and the Science of Plastic Degradation
Spend fifteen years on the quality floor of a recycling operation and you stop thinking of plastic as a single material. You start thinking of…
Articles
The History of Recycling: From 1970 to Today
The history of recycling is older than most people imagine, but the version we live with today (the blue bin at the curb, the three…
Food-Grade Recycled Plastic: EFSA, FDA and Safety
Food-grade recycled plastic is one of the most carefully regulated materials in the packaging world, and for good reason: the polymer that once held a…
How Plastic Is Sorted: NIR, Density and Optical Sorting
If you want to understand how plastic is sorted, you have to picture the floor of a modern material recovery facility (MRF), where a mixed…
PPWR: The EU Packaging Rules Explained
If you have spent any time around packaging design, brand procurement, or the recyclate trading desk over the last two years, you will have heard…
What Is EPR? Extended Producer Responsibility Explained
Walk down any supermarket aisle and you are looking at thousands of decisions about packaging that someone, somewhere, will eventually have to pay to collect,…
HDPE Recycling: Grades and the rHDPE Market
HDPE recycling is one of the quiet success stories of the plastics industry, and yet it is poorly understood outside the trade. High-density polyethylene, the…
PET Recycling: From Bottle to rPET
Walk down any beverage aisle and pick up a clear water bottle. There is a real chance the plastic in your hand has lived a…
The 3 R’s Explained: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Hierarchy
TL;DR, If every household on Earth recycled perfectly starting tomorrow, we would still be in ecological freefall. Recycling is the least important of the three…
E-Waste: The Growing Problem of Electronic Recycling
1. Introduction: A 62-Million-Tonne Wake-Up Call In 2022, humanity threw away 62 million tonnes of electronic waste. That is not a typo, and it is…