Guardian Dumpster Rentals of Huntington, Huntington, New York, announced it is merging with BIG-V Dumpster Rentals to serve New York’s Suffolk and Nassau Counties.

Guardian Dumpster Rental will provide 10-, 20- and 30-yard roll-off dumpsters for area residents and businesses.

A Guardian spokesperson says that the company is focused on offering solutions for home cleanup and remodeling projects as well as hurricane cleanup efforts.

"Clutter is an issue that is overwhelming too many homes on Long Island. You'd be surprised at the sense of relief people find when we haul off the dumpster full of unwanted items they were finally able to get rid of," the company said via a release.

"Long Island is experiencing a huge amount of housing renovations and it's great to be available when the community needs us," the company continued. 

Several nongovernmental organizations are spearheading an initiative called the United States Plastics Pact, which aims to make all plastic packaging 100 percent reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025.

The creation of the U.S. Plastics Pact has been jointly announced by The Recycling Partnership, based in Falls Church, Virginia; the United Kingdom-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation; and the Switzerland-based World Wildlife Fund. The pact was announced at an online event hosted by Oakland, California-based Greenbiz Circularity.

The groups call the pact “an ambitious initiative to unify more than 70 diverse public-private stakeholders – ‘Activators of The Pact’ – across each part of the supply and plastics manufacturing chain to rethink the way we design, use and reuse plastics in order to create a path toward a circular economy for plastic in the U.S.”

The pact has identified four targeted results:

• to define a list of packaging to be designated as problematic or unnecessary by 2021, and to “take measures to eliminate them by 2025;” 
• to ensure that by 2025, all plastic packaging is 100 percent reusable, recyclable or compostable;
• to undertake what the pact calls “ambitious actions to effectively recycle or compost 50 percent of plastic packaging” by 2025; and
• to reach an average recycled content or “responsibly sourced bio-based content” in plastic packaging of 30 percent by 2025.

The organizers of the U.S. Plastics Pact say it was created in part because “individualized action has proven insufficient thus far in achieving significant, system-wide change. Reaching this specific vision will require new levels of innovation and collaboration from all ‘activators’ of the U.S. Plastics Pact and beyond.”

Several industry associations have joined the U.S. Plastics Pact, including the American Beverage Association (ABA) and the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI).

“As the voice of the recycling industry, ISRI is proud to be a founding member of the U.S. Plastics Pact,” says ISRI Vice President of Advocacy Adina Renee Adler. “The pact underscores ISRI’s long-standing efforts to inspire stakeholders throughout the plastics and recycling supply chains to commit to responsibly manufacture, collect and recycle plastics and plastic products.

“ISRI’s Design for Recycling principles encourage companies to proactively consider the ultimate destiny of their products during the design stage of a product’s development. Combining U.S. Plastics Pact goals with ISRI’s Design for Recycling principles should inspire producers to design with recycling in mind and to incorporate more recycled plastics in the manufacture of new products.”

“Through collaboration and innovation, our industry is leading with better way solutions to create a circular economy for our plastic bottles while helping to eliminate plastic in the environment,” says Katherine Lugar, ABA president and CEO. “We look forward to sharing our ideas and experience in sustainability with U.S. Plastics Pact members as we work together toward effective and sustainable solutions. Our shared goal will help us realize a world where plastic doesn’t end up where it was never intended to be.”

Companies to join the pact include plastics reprocessor PreZero US Inc., based in Los Angeles, and Kimberly-Clark, Neenah, Wisconsin. 

“PreZero US is proud to be a part of this monumental pact," says CEO Hernan de la Vega. "We view collaboration as a core element to success in developing closed-loop solutions, and joining the U.S. Plastics Pact is consistent with those values. We look forward to leading the charge towards the goal of reducing plastic waste in the U.S. to zero.”

"We aspire to be at the forefront of the transition to a circular, reuse economy and finding new ways of giving consumers the products they need," Kim Underhill, president of Kimberly-Clark's North American Consumer Business, says. "We realize getting there will take game-changing innovation, and we know we're up to the challenge to do more by joining the U.S. Plastics Pact." 

The pact emphasizes measurable change, and PreZero US and Kimberly-Clark say they are committed to transparent, annual reporting, guided by WWF’s ReSource: Plastic Footprint Tracker, which will be used to document annual progress against the pact's four goals. The first task of the founding "activators" of the U.S. Plastics Pact will be to establish a "roadmap" in the first quarter of 2021 to identify key milestones and national solutions to achieving the U.S. targets and realize a circular economy for plastics.

Georgia-Pacific, Atlanta, is expanding its offerings to include paper-padded mailers as one of its new sustainable solutions. This curbside recyclable padded-paper mailer is a sustainable alternative to nonrecyclable dual-material packaging.

According to a news release from Georgia-Pacific, the growth of e-commerce has generated demand for sustainable packaging options as both consumers and retailers are looking for ways to increase the recyclability of their packaging. Georgia-Pacific opened a facility in Arizona in May to manufacture curbside recyclable paper-padded mailers, and Amazon is a key customer for this new business. Georgia-Pacific reports that this will help extend Amazon’s supply chain of this mailer in the western U.S.

“This padded paper mailer is a significant advancement in developing a sustainable packaging alternative to reduce environmental impacts,” says Adam Ganz, vice president of commercial development at Georgia-Pacific. “Shipping items to consumers in a mailer that can be tossed in the bin with the rest of their paper recyclables is a game-changer. We’re excited to bring this to our customers at a time when e-commerce continues to grow rapidly.”

In 2019, Seattle-based Amazon introduced this recyclable paper-padded mailer, which protects customer orders and is fully recyclable curbside, Georgia-Pacific says. Now, more than 100 million of the new mailers have been shipped to customers, reducing waste, saving fuel and offering the same recyclability as traditional Amazon boxes without taking up nearly as much space in trucks or recycling bins. As a supplier of corrugated boxes for Amazon, Georgia-Pacific has previously worked with the company on other packaging solutions and is now producing this new mailer for Amazon.

“Crafting Amazon’s recyclable padded envelope required the ingenuity of scientists, engineers and technicians at Amazon’s and Henkel’s packaging and materials lab,” says Kim Houchens, director of customer packaging experience at Amazon. “Replacing our comingled material mailer (paper bonded to bubble wrap) with a curbside recyclable paper padded mailer continues our waste reduction initiatives, which since 2015, have reduced the weight of outbound packaging by 33 percent and eliminated more than 810,000 tons of packaging material, the equivalent of 1.5 billion shipping boxes.”

The new mailer combines an expansive material, which does not contain polystyrene, between layers of kraft paper made at Georgia-Pacific’s paper mills. Georgia-Pacific reports that this material technology was introduced by Henkel’s Packaging and Consumer Goods Division in 2019 and received a diamond finalist Packaging Innovation Award. The mailer also received a “Widely Recyclable” label from How2Recycle based on lab tests at a recycled fiber mill, which means it can be deposited in any curbside single-stream recycling bin.

“Georgia-Pacific is a great manufacturing partner for the recyclable paper padded mailers, and we are looking forward to extending the ability to provide curbside recyclable packaging to Amazon and others,” says Scott Farber, Henkel global head of marketing – paper solutions.

Georgia-Pacific says it added 80 jobs at its new manufacturing facility in Tolleson, Arizona, to manufacture this product. The company will begin supplying Amazon’s West Coast fulfillment centers with potential expansion to other parts of the country. Amazon is the flagship customer for this plant, but Georgia-Pacific plans to offer this product to other customers seeking alternative envelope solutions. 

Global consultancy McKinsey & Co., in an article prepared by its Chemicals group in August, says Europe is in the midst of “quiet before the storm” in terms of plastic recycling efforts that will ramp up this decade.

The article, co-authored by McKinsey employees working from four different European offices, concludes, “While some uncertainty remains around how to scale plastics recycling, the pressure to adapt to sustainability and ever-evolving customer expectations is here to stay.”

The result, add the authors, is “brand owners, recyclers, and players in chemicals each have a role to play. Those that respond quickly and decisively will drastically increase their chances of remaining competitive in the years to come.”

McKinsey’s researchers say they interviewed representatives from nearly 60 recycling companies located in 12 different nations. Along with the longer term optimism, the recyclers indicated that significant current challenges must be addressed first.

“Despite positive boundary conditions, plastics recycling is not (yet) thriving as an industry; and many recyclers struggle to overcome a lack of product standardization, volatile customer demand and inefficient sortation processes,” writes the consultancy.

However, conditions that will spur greater—and profitable—future activity are largely in place, both the recyclers interviewed and the consultants contend. Those conditions include European Union recycling targets and corporate sustainability recycling commitments.

“In 2017, the EU set a target for recycling 50 percent of plastic packaging by 2025 and 55 percent by 2030,” note the authors. “Brand owners across a variety of industries have also pledged to improve plastics usage and recycling through four main areas of focus, some committing to bold quantitative targets during this same period.” McKinsey points to such commitments by Unilever and Coca-Cola as examples.

Investments in mechanical recycling, and likely chemical recycling, will be necessary. Among several suggestions for meeting recycling targets from the interviewed recyclers and consultants alike is “investing in technologies such as AI [artificial intelligence] and higher quality washing systems [that] can incrementally improve sorting and the quality of recycled materials, making them more competitive with virgin plastics.”

The full seven-page article can be read or downloaded from this web page.