The magazine ANALYSE NEDERLAND wrote an interesting article about plastic packaging in the food industry. “If the business community puts its weight behind it, all plastic packaging will become easily recyclable”

Discussion on plastic packaging

The discussion about the use of plastic packaging has only increased since then, but is it justified? After all, plastic packaging helps to keep products fresh for longer and therefore results in much less wastage. More importantly, much plastic packaging in the food industry – including the plastic food containers from pack-store.com – is made from polypropylene: an easy-to-process material that is 100% recyclable.

Chris Bruijnes, director of the Knowledge Institute for Sustainable Packaging (KIDV), has the following to say about this: “If we don’t make plastic too complicated and all handle it properly, there’s nothing wrong.”

He later continues with “Plastic is a hot item right now. Packaging discussions are nine times out of ten about plastic packaging … Often, however, we cannot live without it. Think of the well-known foil over the cucumber or bell pepper. This foil can be removed if the consumer eats the cucumber quickly. Also the cucumber has been grown close to home. But the entire supply chain for these types of products is often so long that packaging is necessary to ensure that they do not spoil. People don’t understand that enough.“

When asked what the business community can do to become more sustainable, Chris Bruijnes responds as follows.
“Packaging is not the competitive element in a product. The value of a package is usually not dominant in relation to the content. But in recent years, large companies have come to realize that they have to make a contribution to the circular economy. This means more attention is being paid to packaging. Also because the consumer asks them to do so and the packaging presents us with a mirror of non-circularity.”

Biobased plastic

Despite the fact that a lot of packaging is 100% recyclable, there is still a lot to do and a lot to gain in particular in the field of plastic packaging.

One of the opportunities lies in the field of Biobased plastic. Intopack, the sister company of Pack-Store, was the first factory in the Netherlands that makes plastic food containers from biobased materials. It is a raw material that consists of a renewable material. Also it meets the highest requirements for recycling. The material is based on ethanol that comes from residual waste from sugar cane production. An additional advantage is that the recyclability of this raw material is completely equal to packaging produced from fossil raw materials. The Biobased packaging can therefore be disposed of with ‘normal’ plastic waste so that they can be easily recycled. Click here to read about the difference between containers made of polypropylene and Bio50+.