Showing posts with label Landfills. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Landfills. Show all posts

October 28, 2012

A Bottle Revolution


How many of you feel sort of disgusting every time you take out the trash with bottles and containers?

According to Earth911, only 27% of plastic and 25% of glass ends up getting recycled, with the majority ending up instead in landfills. 

This is one reason that I really like the new eco.bottles made by Ecologic, a sustainable (i.e. green) packaging company.

The containers are made of two parts:

- The inner plastic pouch that holds the liquid and snaps into the second part.
- The outer shell made of 100% recycled cardboard and newspaper (and in turn is 100% recycable again). 

These containers result is a net 70% plastic reduction!

Yet, they have the same strength and functionality of plastic containers, with comparable results in drop, ship, and moisture tests.

And companies like, Seventh Generation, a leader in sustaibable cleaning, paper, and personal care products have signed on and is using eco.bottles, and they have seen sales increase 19% with it. 

In a Bloomberg BusinessWeek (25 October 2012) article, the chief operating officer of The Winning Combination states: "The minute you look at it, you get it. This is a bottle that's good for the planet."

Like these eco.bottles, we need more of our decisions to be driven by what is good for us long-term, so this is not just a revolutionary green bottle, but perhaps a true sustainable evolution in our thinking and behaving all around. 

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February 26, 2012

Pouch, Protect, and (Disa)ppear


This video from Monosol is a little hokey on the inspiring and teamwork pieces, but I think they are definitely on to something with their product innovation for soluble, biodegradable, (and even flavorable) packaging films.

Using the best of material science, they are changing the dirty game of use and dispose into use and dissolve and in some cases use and eat!

The film wrap can be used for agricultural and household goods--individually wrapped portions of food, dissolvable laundry bags for infection control, or packaging and protecting any molded products.

According to Just Live Greener, in the U.S. alone, "single-use items consume nearly 100,000 tons of plastic and 800,000 tons of tree pulp, and will still be in our landflill 300 years from now."

If we can package, protect, and keep sanitized our food, clothes, and "things," and do it in a way that is safe for the environment, we have a double-win!

Monosol has some cool ideas with packaging food in the soluble films and adding nutrients and flavoring to wrapping, so a wrapper is not just a wrapper, but just another element of the food itself.

According to fast Company, Monolsol's earning topped $100M last year, and that this could be just the tip of the packaged iceberg.

A disappearing packaging wrapper that is not only soluble, but eatable--I say pass the salt, please. ;-)

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