Imagine motoring across the cobalt blue waters of the Atlantic and gazing out over the bow in search of a leviathan. You are in good company with teammates armed with hand nets and an experienced captain who knows these waters better than any scientist.
Clarissa Morawski
Single-use packaging is easy to spot. A short walk along a beach, anywhere in the world, will reveal the consequences of our throwaway culture as each tide brings in a fresh layer of debris, most of it single-use plastics.
Working with the ever-changing stream of packaging innovations is a constant challenge for the plastics recycling industry.
The PET package has come a long way since the founding of the National Association for PET Container Resources in October of 1987.
Conrad MacKerron
In the last two years, there has been a positive shift by previously recalcitrant brands to accept the importance of packaging recycling as part of total product life cycle and to commit to increasing packaging recyclability.
This story originally appeared in the August 2016 issue of Plastics Recycling Update.
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In its bid to improve the environment, the Chinese government is expected to further restrict imports of scrap plastics, although a specific timeline for action isn’t clear.
The SPI Resin Identification Code (RIC), now the property of ASTM, an international standards organization, was created in 1988 to help recycling stakeholders know which plastic was being used for containers. Required on certain containers in 39 states in the U.S., the RIC names six resins without defining them and provides a seventh number for all others.
