Amcor achieves EcoVadis Gold medal

You want to order online but hate the non-recyclable packaging material used in e-commerce in addition to cardboard? You are a restaurant owner and want to cut down on the dozens of Styrofoam boxes that your fish is delivered in every day? You are thinking of building a house but worry about the carbon emissions linked to using concrete and steel? It can seem difficult to find adequate alternatives for these seemingly ubiquitous, carbon-intensive materials, but alternatives do exist. Recyclable packaging and wood-based construction materials are already here and ready to be used on a much bigger scale. The exhibition Forests and the Circular Economy. A future without plastics, opened yesterday at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. It showcased some of the many renewable and sustainably sourced products that the forest sector can offer, providing solutions to global challenges as part of a circular economy.

"As far as recyclability is concerned, the plastic bottle is probably slightly better because it is likely only made from one plastic, and so is easier to recycle than a multilayer material like a beverage carton," says Rolf Buschmann, waste and resource expert with the German environmental organization BUND, who worked on the group's 2019 Plastic Atlas. He explains that only the paper part of the drink carton would be recycled — everything else, including the plastic coating or layer or aluminum foil, would be incinerated as residual waste. "In recent years there's been a trend toward so-called multilayer packaging, which is extremely light and thin. It saves material as well as CO2 emissions during transport, but can't be recycled," Christiani says. Because it is not possible to melt the different plastics together, or — at least for now — to separate the individual films from one another at recycling plants. A 2017 cyclos-HTP study into the recyclability of conventional packaging waste concluded that a third of it was not recyclable, and only 40% of the remaining two-thirds was made into plastic recyclate. The rest was used as fuel — in other words it was incinerated. click read more below for more of the story

The new online forest certification system aims to provide a simple and cost-effective solution to assist the UK’s small and medium-sized private forest owners to become PEFC-certified. The new tool is designed to help increase the UK’s certified forest area and boost the supply of certified material to the UK primary processing sector and its customers. The online tool was launched at a special Press Lunch in central London during a rare UK gathering of major figures from PEFC, including PEFC International Chairman, William Street, and CEO Ben Gunneberg, to discuss key issues surrounding the global forestry, construction, paper and packaging industries. While PEFC forest certification has been established in the UK for five years, it has long been recognized that a cost-effective certification solution was required to enable smaller woodland owners to participate in certification.