Recycling plastics could help threatened ecosystems and save the global economy US$80 to 120 billion every year.
Plastics do bring many benefits to our lives: they are lightweight, versatile and cheap; they help protect our food and make our cars lighter. They combine unrivalled functional properties with low cost and so have become the ubiquitous workhorse material of modern production.
Plastic packaging makes up 26 per cent of the plastics market, and the demand for plastics is expected to double in the next 20 years. However, forty years after the launch of the first universal recycling symbol, only 14 per cent of plastic packaging is collected for recycling globally, and only 10 per cent effectively gets recycled. Failure to address the way we handle waste could mean that by 2050 there is more plastic in the oceans than fish.
The lead of the New Plastics Economy initiative at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, says it’s time to tackle the root cause of plastic pollution and move towards a circular approach by which plastics are designed to stay in the economy, and out of the environment.
Industry players need to collaborate on creating an effective after-use plastics economy by improving the economics and uptake of recycling, reuse and controlled biodegradation. This is the cornerstone of the New Plastics Economy and its first priority.Innovation in how we design, use and recover plastic packaging is key to drastically reduce leakage of plastics into natural systems (in particular the ocean), and to decouple plastics from fossil feedstocks by using renewable feedstocks, dematerializing, and reducing cycle losses.
2017 is a significant year of Magic Moments as we successfully launched the product redesign projects for increasing the eco-friendliness of our packaging products. Redesign helps reducing material consumption of product, hence, lowering carbon footprint to protect the nature. In this bright new year, we will focus on the application of various eco materials to further enhance the eco-friendliness of our products.
Discover more:
http://www.eco-business.com/news/the-future-for-plastics-is-circular/
Source: Eco-Business (2017). The future for plastics is circular .