Collection Corner

Danone, Paris, has announced new commitments and actions to ensure its packaging will be totally circular and to accelerate the transition toward a circular economy.

“We believe the time is now to step up and accelerate, embrace our responsibility and work with others to engage a radical shift that will help free the world from packaging waste,” says Emmanuel Faber, chairman and CEO of Danone. “We will be acting both at global and local [levels] to ensure circularity of packaging becomes the new norm.”

Danone says it plans to ensure all its packaging is designed to be 100 percent recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025. The company will develop alternative delivery models or new reuse models where relevant, and it will take action to eliminate problematic or unnecessary plastic packaging.

About 86 percent of Danone’s packaging is recyclable, reusable or compostable, according to the company, and about 50 percent of its water volumes are sold in reusable jugs.

Because effective collection and recycling systems are needed to ensure packaging is recycled, reused or composted, Danone says it will support more effective publicly organized collection and recycling systems, including extended producer responsibility and deposit return scheme systems, when relevant.

Plastic waste can be collected and recycled into a shelter for emergency situations, according to an experimental project presented at Ecomondo in Rimini, Italy.

Waste Free Oceans (WFO) and Italy-based Corepla partnered to create a humanitarian shelter prototype with plastic collected along the Po river in Italy.

WFO says the plastic was collected using experimental polyethylene barriers in the river. After being recycled by Corepla, the material was sent to U.K.-based Protomax Plastics to produce the boards to build the shelter.

At the end of Ecomondo, the shelter was disassembled and sent to Athens, Greece, to help refugees.

The concept, WFO says, is to “manage part of the refugee’s plastic waste in order to produce recycled panels” that can be “used to build emergency shelters or any other useful structures suitable to their needs.”

The Paper Stock Industries (PSI) Chapter of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), Washington, held its most successful annual fundraising bowling tournament to date Oct. 17 at Lucky Strike Chicago.

The fundraiser for PSI’s academic scholarship fund earned enough to allow the chapter to give $2,000 scholarships to eight students next year, matching its 2018 scholarship record, PSI reports.

The bowling tournament featured 12 five-person teams, with “Quilmington Paper”—a team of participants from Wilmington Paper Corp., Pine Brook, New Jersey, and Quincy Recycle, Alsip, Illinois, taking top honors.

The winning team—Stuart Lurie, Kurt McLaughlin, John Danker, Brett Lurie and Phil Bellafiore—posted a single-game team score of 698.