Recycling revisted
January 23rd, 2015 | Green Issues
Of course bottles, paper and carton have a comparatively simple journey through the recycling chain, whereas plastics are a bit more complicated. If I understand it correctly it’s only the ‘hard’ plastics that can be recycled anyway (not the plastic wrappers as I am always reminding Angela). This means that most of the materials that we use in our bottling will be born again, which only really leaves the closure.
For some time now (over ten years) we have been using Nomacorc which is made from low-density polyethylene, classified as food-grade No. 4 recyclable plastic. On face value therefore, there should be no problem simply throwing all your Castro Martin closures into the plastic recycling, except for one fundamental problem – they are simply too small. Most modern recycling plants have sorting grates, where the smaller items fall through, end up on the floor, and end up being used as landfill. It’s a real waste considering they could be ground into pellets and reformed as food trays, computer hardware, phone cases, floor mats or any number of things. In some parts of the world there are collection points for these closures so that they are not wasted, but unfortunately I don’t really see that happening any time soon in our small corner of the world.
I should finally mention that our closures can also be re-used as pencil ‘erasers’ (please note that I did refrain from calling them ‘rubbers’ which could have caused some consternation amongst our American readers!)
Of course bottles, paper and carton have a comparatively simple journey through the recycling chain, whereas plastics are a bit more complicated. If I understand it correctly it’s only the ‘hard’ plastics that can be recycled anyway (not the plastic wrappers as I am always reminding Angela). This means that most of the materials that we use in our bottling will be born again, which only really leaves the closure.
For some time now (over ten years) we have been using Nomacorc which is made from low-density polyethylene, classified as food-grade No. 4 recyclable plastic. On face value therefore, there should be no problem simply throwing all your Castro Martin closures into the plastic recycling, except for one fundamental problem – they are simply too small. Most modern recycling plants have sorting grates, where the smaller items fall through, end up on the floor, and end up being used as landfill. It’s a real waste considering they could be ground into pellets and reformed as food trays, computer hardware, phone cases, floor mats or any number of things. In some parts of the world there are collection points for these closures so that they are not wasted, but unfortunately I don’t really see that happening any time soon in our small corner of the world.
I should finally mention that our closures can also be re-used as pencil ‘erasers’ (please note that I did refrain from calling them ‘rubbers’ which could have caused some consternation amongst our American readers!)