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We live in a material world

Waste pollution in product lifecycles is set to ease: beer bottles made from wood‚ toilet rolls from sour milk; biodegradable plastic packing; and LEGO bricks in a new material

More often than not, waste and packaging materials find their way into the environment. As more companies consider the entire life cycle of their products, however, resource waste is expected to ease. New sustainability initiatives point to a new phase in the drive for efficiency in resource consumption

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  • PACKAGING DESIGNED FOR THE COMPOST HEAP

Plastic packaging of food is ubiquitous in the supermarket. It is used to wrap everything from meat to apples. Once the food is gone, the plastic is trashed and at best gets dumped in landfill or incinerated. At worst, it becomes environmentally hazardous litter. In the oceans alone, eight million tonnes of plastic are dumped every year, estimate scientists, forming a toxic link in the food chain.

Breakthrough solutions to plastic pollution are now on the way. London firm Snact has teamed up with Israeli packaging company Tipa to develop a type of biodegradable packaging that will disappear in six months along with the rotten apples, potato peelings and other organic material sent for composting. Tipa has taken the lead in developing the product, which is being used to package everything from T-shirts to Dutch carrots. In the US it is sold as zip bags which degrade in just three months. Tipa is not alone in its efforts. British firm Futarama sells biodegradable packaging film and cellophane which, in the case of customer Nestlé, is used to wrap the firm’s classic Quality Street toffees, chocolates, and caramels.

The US Department of Agriculture has gone one step further and developed a packaging film that can be eaten. The next step is to get it to taste good. •

LEGO SEARCHES FOR A NEW RAW MATERIAL

The interlocking toy building bricks from Danish company LEGO are made from hard plastic in a myriad of colours. Envisioning them any other way is hard, but the time has come. At company headquarters in the town of Billund, LEGO is working on discovering, developing, and implementing a new, sustainable raw material for the more than 60 billion blocks that are produced each year. In June 2015, the company invested $150 million in the project, which is overseen by a newly established Sustainable Material Centre. In addition to employees from all corners of the group, about 100 material specialists have been employed to meet the challenge.

The final choice of material is still unclear, but traditionalist LEGO lovers can take comfort in knowing the blocks have changed before. The LEGO story began with them made from wood. •

FROM SOUR MILK TO LUXURY TOILET PAPER

Milk that has been standing too long in the refrigerator often develops a bad reputation. But that may change. Lucart, an Italian paper material giant, together with innovative minds at German firm Qmilk, has developed a toilet roll made of old milk. Not only might it resolve the challenge of sour milk in the fridge, but also the abundant surplus of waste milk that dairies otherwise pour down the drain. Milk toilet paper, which reached the shelves of Italian supermarkets before Christmas as Carezza de Latte — caress of milk —- is an offshoot of Qmilk’s breakthrough a few years earlier with a hypoallergenic textile made from sour milk, the difference being that the textile needs to be woven, but the toilet paper does not. “From a purely dermatological standpoint, it is really good,” says Qmilk’s founder, microbiologist Anke Domaske. That applies to lactose intolerance sufferers, too. It is lactose free. •

A GREEN, GREEN BOTTLE

In the beginning was beer in a green glass bottle. Later, a green metal can came along. On the way now is beer in a bottle made from wood. That’s right. Wood.

In collaboration with the Danish packaging company ecoXpac, beer giant Carlsberg is developing a new, sustainable bottle made of compressed wood fibre. It will be 100% organic and biodegradable. Expected on the market in less than two years, the bottle will significantly reduce Carlsberg’s carbon footprint, 45% of which consists of glass and aluminium packaging.

Development of the bottle is complete, but Carlsberg is postponing the launch. First, it wants to ready its customers for the prospect of a wooden bottle. “There is a great deal of emotion attached to enjoying a cold beer from the bottle,” notes Carlsberg director of sustainability, Simon Boas Hoffmeyer.

Using wood as the base material for a bottle is the brainchild of Carlsberg Circular Community, which oversaw the product’s development. In January 2014, the year in which the group was founded to work on efficiency in use of resources, the bottle received a cradle-to-cradle certification for its recyclability. •

TEXT Rasmus Thirup Beck