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Retailers, Brands Ride the Wave of Ocean-Bound Plastic

Ocean-bound plastic is gaining small but significant traction within the packaging sector, particularly from those in the rPET market.

Matt Tudball, Senior Editor, Recycling, ICIS
Matt Tudball, Senior Editor, Recycling, ICIS

The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the biggest global disrupters of a generation. In addition to its devastating human impact, the outbreak also saw businesses fold, economies shrink, and the world forced into waves of lockdowns. The petrochemical industry did not escape the impact of the virus; oil prices dropped and rebounded, consumer demand patterns changed, and global supply chains were thrown into disarray.

However, despite the chaos, some pre-COVID topics are coming back to the fore in the petrochemical space, one of which is sustainability. Side-lined at the beginning of the outbreak as demand for single-use plastics for hygiene reasons grew and as some converters chose lower-priced, fossil fuel-derived virgin polymers over higher-priced and less-available recycled materials, sustainability targets are once again getting serious attention from the industry.

Within this sector, ocean-bound plastic (OBP)—defined as plastic waste within 60 km (37 miles) of a coastline or waterway that is at risk of entering the ocean—is gaining small but significant traction within the packaging sector, particularly from those in the rPET market. Now, major European retailers are investing in the sector. Last year, German discount retail chain Lidl won the U.K. Retail Industry Awards’ Sustainable Initiative of the Year 2020 for its use of Bantam International’s Prevented Ocean Plastic (POP) across 13 of its fresh fish products in the U.K. Bantam is one of a growing number of companies supplying OBP globally.

Rising tide of interest

The appetite for OBP is growing. By incorporating OBP into products and packaging, companies are not only helping to support the communities of informal collectors and sorters that are most impacted by plastic waste, but they are also sourcing quality material at comparable prices to European rPET flake.

Retailers such as Sainsbury’s, as well as firms like Childs Farm, a U.K.-based cosmetics company specializing in natural skincare products for children, are now incorporating Bantam’s POP in their packaging.


Read article   Read how multi-stakeholder collaboration may solve the ocean plastics crisis.


So why ocean-bound plastic? Says Childs Farm Sustainability Officer Louise Norman, the company came across OBP in a drive to increase its use of recycled content. The company had reached 30% recycled content in its high-density polyethylene bottles three years ago, but wanted to move to 100% recycled content because its feels strongly that it’s the right thing to do. So it looked at rPET as an alternative.

“We couldn’t find the HDPE supply, so we looked at rPET. We saw various grades, but [one of our converters] came to us with OBP,” Norman relates. She adds that other recycled materials had a greyish tint, which the company would have happily attributed to using 100% recycled content—a message that fits in with Childs Farm’s overall sustainability goals. But OBP comes from PCR PET bottles, manually collected and sorted, so it has only a slight yellow tint.

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