But my engineering friend on the phone paints a picture that’s more bleak than lean.
“To meet cost-cutting goals for 2009, we cut out travel and training and attendance at events,” he says. “At the same time, we’re putting in more and more sophisticated equipment. If we don’t train people to run and maintain that equipment, if we don’t have our engineers out networking and learning at technical conferences, I don’t see how we can be sustainable. We may meet our financial goals for a given year, but eventually we’ll start sliding. The path we’re on worries me.” It worries me too. How far will the bean counters go?
More encouraging, on the other hand, are recent recycling developments that come from the good news side of the packaging scene. For example, there’s the announcement by organic produce leader Earthbound Farm that it aims to use only post-consumer recycled PET in its clamshells. Earthbound seems to understand that its move to PCR PET will help create a larger U.S. market for post-consumer recycled materials. The company’s manager of sustainability initiatives, Chad Smith, admits that sourcing PCR PET is still a bit of a challenge. Kudos to Earthbound for helping to stimulate demand for post-consumer recycled materials. Now let’s hope those on the supply side can keep up. (For more on sourcing PCR PET, listen to a podcast with Chad Smith at packworld.com/podcast-27853).
Paralleling Earthbound’s announcement is news from Naked Juice that it aims to have its entire product line in 100% PCR PET bottles by the end of next year (see p. 10). This, too, is encouraging. I think we’ve neglected recycling in the recent past. We’ve allowed more exotic solutions—biopolymers, for example—to capture our imagination. But the recycling infrastructure is in place, and it works. Let’s expand it and build on it by making sure that recyclers know there will be a buyer for the materials they are reclaiming. That’s not to say that newer and sexier solutions should be abandoned. (I’m especially intrigued by Kureha’s Kuredux, a petroleum-based polyester that is said to have gas barrier properties far superior to PET yet biodegrades like cellulose.) But let’s not take our eye off the ball where recycling is concerned.
