London Bio Packaging supplies biodegradable or recycled packaging and eco cleaning products to the food and catering industry. Good website, not so common in this industry.
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Plastic Bottle Sail boat
It took four months to sail a boat made of discarded plastic bottles from San Francisco to Australia. The catamaran was built with 12,500 recycled plastic bottles and a fully recyclable plastic material called Seretex and held together with organic glue made from cashew-nut husks and sugarcane. The bottles were packed into the Plastiki’s pontoons in a pomegranate-like structure, giving the boat 68% of its buoyancy. Rothschild’s mission to change the public’s perception of plastic continues as his team brainstorms new ways to reuse the commonly discarded material in everything from surfboards to wind turbines. Every year people are throwing away tons of waste, that can actually be used as building material. Via Time who just rewarded the 50 best inventions of 2010.
Stretchable Paper
FibreForm – a packaging paper that can replace plastic where it was previously impossible. “The potential for creating unique packaging solutions is enormous. Never before has there been a similar paper on the market”, says Peter Bergström, Product Area Manager, and responsible for the development project of Billerud FibreForm. The high stretchability of the paper means that it can be formed. And with a stretchability of up to 20 per cent, FibreForm breaks records. The normal stretchability of paper is usually between 2 and 4 per cent. Some sack papers can reach up to 7 per cent. Fibreform offers new opportunities for packaging solutions such as deep-drawn trays. “FibreForm can be converted in normal thermoforming machines without any major investments being required so it’s perfect for food products. It is also possible to make really deep embossings, something that has previously been impossible on paper”, says Peter Bergström. Read more here
Coffee Cup Contest
58 billion paper coffee cups are thrown away, unrecycled, each year. The BetaCup Challenge – is asking designers to invent a mean to dramatically reduce the wastage resulting from unrecyclable paper coffee cups. Here are two of the ideas; Coffee to grow and 100% recyclable Une Coffee Cup. See more of the most promising ideas here
Bone Project – Ethical Defendable?
What’s this? Bone? This looks cruel. But as a matter of fact we have these rest products around the globe. And Andrew Ross – a creative soul has done an extensive project about how we could deal with it. The Bone Project has discovered ways to use bone when it’s a waste material. Research was divided between three different areas: perception, properties and fabrication. I would personally like to see more answers around perception; how ethical defendable is this? Would people accept it as they accept leather or red meat? Is leather and meat getting less and less accepted and this would be a step backwards? He developed a whole portfolio of products and during the process he also discovered that bone possesses unique chemical properties. Existing research proposes that ground bone can be used to remediate soil contaminated with heavy metals. However, it should be possible to use whole bone to absorb the toxins released by electronic products, and batteries, upon their disposal. Therefore he designed this battery capsule.
Wine in PET?
Boisset introduces Fog Mountain Merlot in a 1-L PET bottle. I recommend you to read through the article on Greener Package. You will see some statements about sustainability, which as always will give you different answers depending on who you ask. Boisset in this case, claims that the PET bottles have a smaller carbon footprint than comparable glass bottles and require less energy to produce, ship, and recycle. A big driver for these companies is of course cost – amount of material – which in many cases also drives environmental impact. A 1-L Fog Mountain Merlot PET bottle contains 33% more wine than a standard 750-mL glass bottle, even though the two bottles are similar in physical size. Interesting! I have always found it so interesting that the icon of a traditional wine bottle is so strong, that even if new technologies enable more efficient distribution – it’s hard to make a change. Consumers have a strong power whether this will be a success or not.
Banana Leaves as Packaging Material
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This wonderful concept is made for Designboom’s competition ”Dining in 2015″, by Israeli designer Tal Marco. Not only it´s a renewable resource. Also the banana leaves have good properties for the food industry, it has a waxlike surface which is perfect for wet and greasy stuff. A flexible material so it can be folded in many different ways. Easy to open, you simply tear it open along the natural perforations.
Compostable Bread Packaging
Compostable Bread Packaging from Village Bakery
Found this nice little figure in a paper about drivers for biodegradable/compostable plastics and role of composting in waste management and sustainable agriculture. Reading about this subject, it´s definitely moving forward, but big concerns when plastics and bio-degradable materials not are distinguished enough, so the consumers mix them up - problems for the recycling management.An article from the city of LA, where Neil Guglielmo, a division manager with the city’s Bureau of Sanitation says: ”When you talk about making something compostable, it’s great, but the downside is: Can you then actually compost it? I’d hate to see compostable bags end up having to go to a landfill. “When compostable plastic is mixed with standard plastic, it makes the batch structurally unsound. And the result can only be tossed into a landfill.”
Solar Bottle
Conceptual. A PET bottle disinfecting microbiologically contaminated raw water. The bottle has two faces; one transparent face for maximum UV-A rays collection and one Al face that absorbs the infrared sunrays, heating it and therefore starting the disinfection. Alberto Meda and Francisco Gomez Paz are the designers and apparently they are looking for a producer.
Recycled material
Aquados - selling their detergent in an injection molded packaging made of recycled post consumer polypropylene. The packaging was awarded the 20th Dupont packaging award. The use of recycled PP reduces the carbon footprint in the material phase by 20%.