Vanden: time to render single-use plastics ‘obsolete’

United Kingdom – The biggest culprit when it comes to the UK’s ‘woeful’ recycling rate of 30% for consumer plastic packaging is plastics that can’t be recycled easily or cost-effectively, according to Vanden, a company with operations in six countries that handles more than 100 grades of recoverable plastics.

‘Single-use’ plastic is the area in which ‘new policy, legislation, design, behaviours and processes must drive change’, insists David Wilson, managing director of Vanden Recycling in the UK. ‘We all need to work together to find ways of managing single-use plastics out of the system.’

Vanden Recycling is offering to help retailers by bringing its recycling expertise to the packaging design process through, for example, a free initial consultation to help find the best solution both technically and economically.

The company argues that too much plastic packaging is difficult to recycle – such as vacuum-packed meat trays with multi-layers of different plastic types.

‘The cost to recycle these is more than the market will pay,’ it says. ‘This makes them unsustainable and so we should render them obsolete.’

And Vanden continues: ‘If packaging designers, retailers and manufacturers designed for ease of recycling, reprocessing costs would reduce, quality would improve, and demand would increase. This would make it an easier decision to invest in UK reprocessing infrastructure.’