Are Pouches Eco Friendly?
Flexible plastic pouches are a more eco-friendly packaging solution compared to traditional options like glass, paper, or aluminum. One of their primary advantages is their effectiveness in reducing food waste. These pouches provide superior protection for products, safeguarding them from environmental factors and extending shelf life.
Additionally, the production of flexible plastic pouches requires significantly less energy, contributing to a lower overall carbon footprint. Their lightweight nature also means that they are more efficient to transport, reducing fuel consumption and emissions associated with logistics.
When it comes to disposal, these pouches often occupy less space in landfills compared to their rigid counterparts. Overall, flexible plastic pouches offer a more sustainable packaging alternative by minimizing resource usage and environmental impact throughout their lifecycle.
Pouches Made with Post-Consumer Recycled Materials
At Bison Bag, we’ve taken the concept of recyclable pouches and made it a reality. We design and produce recyclable packaging with 100% polyethylene. When clean and dry, these pouches can be recycled at store drop-off locations.
Not only does the environment benefit from the re-use of materials time and time again, but consumers and brands benefit as well. Brands gain the recognition they want from consumers, and consumers feel good buying a product that is brought into their home with sustainability in mind.
These types of pouches are excellent choices for products such as snacks, sweeteners, flour, nuts, baking mixes, pet food and detergent packs.
Polyester/Polyethylene (PET/PE) Pouches Made from High Percentage Post-Consumer Recycled (PCR) Resin
These pouches feel and look the same as other pouches that are made without post-consumer recycled materials. There’s no discernible change in product feel or brand recognition, and consumers will be happy to see additional labeling on the pouch indicating that the pouches have been switched for more sustainable material sources. Just the same pouches that everyone knows and loves from your brand, but with a more environmentally responsible practice and no required action for the consumer to take with the package. Additionally, this format runs the same as conventional film on current manufacturing equipment and tools, making it easy to adopt into your brand.
Choose Bison Bag
Rigid plastic packaging is becoming a thing of the past, and Bison Bag is here to usher in a new era of responsible manufacturing and sustainable packaging – with your help.
Are you ready to make the switch to pouches made from a renewable resource? Creating sustainable materials from post-consumer recycled materials? It takes a team to collaborate and create the perfect solution.
Get in touch with our team today and let us know what you need in a pouch for your product.
Taking Sustainable Pouches from Concept to Reality
At Bison Bag, we are taking the concept of sustainable pouches and turning it into a reality. By providing your company with pouches using bioplastics, we can ensure sustainable materials are available to more manufacturers, and more consumers.
These bioplastics are known as PLA, or polylactic acid. This film works the same way without any loss in efficiency or durability from their artificial counterparts, but instead of being made from traditional plastics, PLA is derived from fermented plant starches.
Industrially Compostable Pouches
Most flexible packaging contains a multi-layer film that prevents it from being recycled. At Bison Bag, we create compostable materials that provide durable packages for your products’ shelf life, ensuring that it can readily degrade at industrial composting facilities.
Source Reduction
Sourcing the materials that create your packaging is one of the most environmentally secure strategies of continuing production of packaging while also saving natural resources and reducing pollution. This means ensuring your products are using as little resources as possible, while also ensuring they are sourced from already recycled materials, rather than new raw materials. Lightweight packaging, such as recyclable pouches, can conserve energy and reduce the overall toxicity of our waste, while saving money for consumers and businesses alike.
Embracing Sustainability
Advantages of Swapping Rigid Containers for Pouches
If you are switching a product from a rigid container to a pouch, there’s a lot to celebrate. Not only does this leave your company filling landfills with less waste in the first place, but it also generates less CO2 during packaging production. Furthermore, because of the differences in storage and dimension, pouches require fewer trucks for transportation, require an estimate of 50% less energy to produce, and uses an estimated 60% less plastic.
Recyclable Pouches FAQ
Are Pouches Recyclable?
Unfortunately, most pouches are not recyclable. However, programs are growing for hard to recycle plastics around the Country. This is because the standard pouch we know of today is layered with multiple layers of material, sourced from untouched raw materials that have not yet been recycled, then assembled together and heat sealed. Most material recovery programs do not have a method of separating these layers. Also,recycling machines cannot sort as easily, getting tangled in their equipment.
There are a few exceptions to the recyclability of pouches, depending on where they came from and how these pouches were made. At Bison Bag, we strive to change the dynamics of consumers’ ability to recycle pouches, bringing real, sustainable solutions into the picture.
As with all recycling, there is difficulty in both assuring that all parts of the pouch are recyclable (mono-material) – but also that it is cleaned of all food waste on the inside. Pouches that still contain food waste or product waste on the inside are unlikely to be fit for recycling, even if the pouch materials are recyclable.
Why Are Stand-Up Pouches Not Recyclable?
Stand-up pouches are a category of flexible packaging. This type of packaging has a lowered carbon footprint compared to other forms of plastic package production, but we could do better.
Thousands of pounds of pouches land in the landfill every year because of our inability to handle these layered flexible packages properly. The trick to determining whether these stand-up pouches are recyclable or not is the process of creating a stand-up pouch that doesn’t require the same non-recyclable materials.
At Bison Bag, we believe in real sustainable solutions, including source reduction and using as much post-consumer recycled materials as possible to create less strain on an environment, support a circular economy and use feedstock from the recycling system.
Let’s Talk Packaging
Are you ready to talk flexible packaging in a way that makes real, sustainable sense for both consumers and the environment? Let’s take your bulky, rigid container product and find ways to save your business money while making a sustainable move.
At Bison Bag, we’re thrilled to be introducing our recyclable pouches to the world. There’s a lot of good that can come from continuing to produce the same snacks and other products that we know and love, so long as we take the sustainability problems seriously as manufacturers.
Sustainability isn’t a buying trend that’s going away, and our environment can’t handle any more waste.
Let’s start a conversation and make the world a better place.
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