Ineos tackles closed-loop bottle cap recycling in collaboration with Forever Plast

With too many jobs and too few people to do them, companies in the technical industries and manufacturing facing a serious skills gap in Europe and elsewhere – including the UK. 

At the 2020 Petcore Conference this year in Brussels, Gian de Belder, leader of the Holy Grail project and  Sustainability and Circular Economy Scientist at P&G announced that P&G’s Pioneer Holy Grail project, which kicked off in 2016, would finally be bearing fruit.

Maag Group member Ettlinger, a leading manufacturer of high performance melt filters, has picked Ricco International Trade & Consultancy to become its new sales partner for the Polish market. 

As demand for recycled content in packaging grows, Finnish label producer UPM Raflatac is contributing, with label materials made from recycled plastic.

A survey conducted by UK-based contract packing company WePack has found that 48% of people try to reuse packaging to be ‘eco-friendly’. While just 5% of respondents stated bluntly that they simply threw it away, quite a large percentage of those remaining indicated taking a more ‘I-do-if-I-can’ approach.

According to German market research institute Ceresana’s most recent Market Study: Bioplastics – the fifth report of its kind produced by the company -  polylactic acids, starch blends, cellulose, and other bioplastics are achieving significantly higher growth rates than standard plastics based on fossil or mineral resources.

British-Dutch consumer goods giant Unilever has undertaken to reduce the environmental impact of its products by half by 2030, a goal that includes the packaging used to protect and market its brands. 

Swiss greentech pioneer AVA Biochem AG and the Michelin Group have entered into a joint development agreement, the companies have announced, with the ultimate aim of establishing the world's first commercial-scale production plant of the platform chemical 5-HMF. 

A report compiled by sustainability consultancy Eunomia signals a number of trends in PET collection and sorting, one of the most important of which is the growing use of rPET in bottle-to-bottle recycling, mainly in response to manufacturer demand.

On-Pack Recycling Label Ltd. (OPRL), a UK non-profit scheme with over 400 members, is introducing new rules governing recycling labels, which it says will give greater transparency on the final fate of packaging.