Plastic Packaging
Water bottles have been the poster child of ocean plastic pollution for years. While beverage bottles are definitely a problem, they’re usually made from plastics #1 or #2 - meaning they have a greater likelihood of being recycled. Unfortunately, the majority of packaging for the products we regularly consume - like candy bar wrappers, chip bags, and individual shampoo sachets - are made of a complicated mix of plastics and films.
That complexity means plastic packaging has almost no value in a traditional recycling system...and consequently end up lost in the environment or burned in places without waste management infrastructure.
What’s the story behind plastic packaging as we know it today?
Welp, here’s a brief history of plastic packaging. The summary of the story is that as we moved away from eating recently and locally produced food to buying our food in a supermarket, we needed packaging that would keep it fresh for longer periods of time. Enter plastic bags, bottles, and boxes. As more of our food was shipped all over the world we needed lightweight, flexible packaging that could keep a bag of chips from England fresh on its journey to a market in Indonesia - or a mango from Ecuador protected on its journey to Montana.
Let’s be honest. While we may strive to be plastic-free in our homes, we all crave a candy bar or the perfect barbecue flavored chip at times...or all the time during a long winter quarantine, tbh. That consumer demand means flexible plastic packaging will likely continue to play a growing role in our food supply.
Why is that a rapidly growing factor in the ocean plastic pollution crisis?
Like any environmental health crisis, there are a number of contributing factors. Here are the top 3 reasons flexible packaging is a growing percentage of ocean plastic pollution:
1. Sachets (think shampoo at a motel) have become the most popular packaging for lower-income families that can only afford single servings of products. The Philippines alone uses nearly 6 billion sachets each year for household goods.
2. Frequently these families live in places that lack formalized waste management (no trash collection or proper disposal options). That means packaging ends up as litter that gets into sewers or ditches, eventually making its way into the ocean.
3. Plastic packaging helps protect food from being contaminated by germs and pathogens...hence COViD making the ocean plastic problem much worse.
As a global society, we can’t solve our planetary problems by causing additional challenges for lower-income people or by shrugging off the risk of cross-contamination.
So what can we do while we put pressure on the global supply chain to provide reusable packaging or plastic alternatives like graphene? We can start cleaning up the mess we’ve made.
SeaChange is focused on turning unsorted plastic pollution into glass that can be used to restore ecosystems and help with climate change resiliency. SeaChange’s goal is to remove ocean plastic, while restoring and protecting the seascape and sensitive coastal ecosystems.
We chose the Plasma Enhanced Melter (PEM) because it can efficiently process the unsorted waste we’ll receive after a beach cleanup, or collect from informal community waste centers in developing nations and on remote islands. That means we can eliminate 20 tons of packaging waste per day like plastic candy wrappers and cosmetics containers along with tangled ghost nets and organic materials (i.e. seaweed and food waste).
The extreme heat in the system breaks waste down to its molecular level, and then melts remaining solids like metals and minerals in a molten bath. When the liquid glass cools it basically has the same chemical composition as sand. That bio-benign composition means it’s a safe, inert material for coral reef restoration, or to build roads and bridges that are more resilient to the impacts of climate change.
The world has enough doom and gloom news. Let’s focus on scalable solutions instead. Help us launch the first SeaChange mission to get plastic pollution off the planet.