I bought some pool chemicals online a couple a weeks ago from a company called UK Pool Store and I was pleasantly surprised that there was no plastic in the packaging. They’d used just some paper based padding to protect the items. Unfortunately, these chemical products came in plastic containers, but that’s another story – everyone really has to use recycled plastics for containers like these, and that should be the law.
At home, we regularly send packages of artwork as a result of our fabhappy.com site, but we always use recycled products for the packaging. Every time we order something online, we keep the box and the materials they used for the packaging, and make sure they are used at least one time more.
When we have to buy something like packing tape, we use greenstat.co.uk to purchase recycled products. We’ve purchased their fully recycled plastic packing tape, their paper based packing tape and their fully recycled plastic bubble wrap, and we’ve been very happy with the quality and usefulness of these.
So it is possible to use recycled products for sustainable packaging, but it might be just a little bit harder, and therefore people will tend not to do it. That’s why such a requirement should be law. As I said in Ban New Plastic, the only plastics that should be legally allowed now are recycled plastics. We’ve made enough already and people just have to be forced to recycle what we have if they want to use plastics. There’s no reason that recycling should be “optional” or just “encouraged”. That’s a joke.
So thanks to companies like UK Pool Stores for not using plastic in their packaging (but let’s make the product containers out of recycled plastic, hey?), and The Green Stationery Company for making recycled options available to us. Sustainable packing is very possible. We don’t have to pollute the world even more just through packaging.
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