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Wax-Free Cases: Mountaire Farms’ Win is Landfills’ Loss

Poultry processor’s switch to recyclable, food contact-safe cases prevents 87,000+ wax-coated cases from ending up in landfill in first year.

In 2021, Mountaire Farms began using DS Smith’s Greencoat recyclable, corrugated shipper as a replacement for the wax-coated cases traditionally used for meat, poultry, and seafood products.
In 2021, Mountaire Farms began using DS Smith’s Greencoat recyclable, corrugated shipper as a replacement for the wax-coated cases traditionally used for meat, poultry, and seafood products.

With some of its contract farmers “powered by the sun,” its nothing-goes-to-waste philosophy for its chicken processing business, and its efforts to decrease its use of land and water, Mountaire Farms in Millsboro, Del., strives to be a model for sustainability in the poultry industry. And that commitment extends to its packaging, as well.

In 2021, Mountaire—the fourth largest poultry processor in the nation—began using DS Smith’s Greencoat recyclable, corrugated shipper as a replacement for the wax-coated cases traditionally used for meat, poultry, and seafood products. While wax-, or paraffin-, based coatings prevent the moisture that results from the cold and wet environments in which these products are found from damaging the corrugated cases, it makes the shippers non-recyclable. According to DS Smith, not only do these cases end up in landfill, but the cost for companies to get rid of them is steep as well. “U.S. retailers and restaurants pay approximately $50 million annually to dispose of roughly 1.47 million tons of these wax-coated boxes,” it shares. 


Read article   Read this story on how Greencoat was used to produce The Brrr Box, “The Official Cooler of Planet Earth.”
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