Packaging

The new plastic tax is set to take effect in April 2022, but what does that mean for the packaging industry?

At Budget 2017, the government called on a system which can help tackle the usage of single-use plastics, by adding an additional charge to the material.

The impact of non-recyclables on our planet is the hot topic on everyone’s mind at the moment. As responsible packaging suppliers, Tri-Pack continues to work tirelessly to produce and recycle our own sustainable packaging.

Take a raw material >> manufacture it into a product >> use that product >> then transform the product back into the same volume of original raw material.

As a simplistic representation, that is the circular economy.

In a bid to help protect our planet, more and more families and businesses are trying to do their bit by recycling more of their household waste. Local authorities are adding to the pressures by enforcing fines when recyclable waste is disposed of in general waste bins. Waste which is disposed of in these general waste bins is usually sent to landfills, where any food waste will eventually decompose but any plastics, polystyrene or aluminium, for example, will sit for hundreds of years. Many councils provide residents and businesses with separate bins, boxes or bags for different recyclable waste, but the process still isn’t easy and it varies so much around the country.

On Friday 23rd August Tri-pack’s new Managing Director; Paul Rushton, took a stroll around the perimeter fence of the Tri-pack site. Tri-pack is based on an industrial estate located within Grimsby and while seafood is a booming industry in Grimsby, the estate they are located on isn’t exactly famed for fishing businesses.

There is no escaping the press at the moment with their negatives around plastics. The term ‘plastic’ seems to now be linked purely to plastic packaging found in foods, bottles or carrier bags and the negatives of it polluting our planet. But that is only a tiny portion of all plastics.

Expanded Polystyrene, aka EPS is a lightweight cellular plastic material consisting of small hollow spherical balls. EPS is common in the packaging sector for its shock-absorbing properties. It is deemed as the perfect packaging solution for transporting fragile or perishable goods. Anything from electronic items to produce and pharmaceuticals is often packaged and transported in EPS.