Plasticity organizers choose Malaysia as event site

Organizers of the Plasticity Forum events have announced several upcoming dates and venues, including a Plasticity Forum to be held the Ritz Carlton in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Oct. 25, 2018.

Doug Woodring, a co-founder of the Plasticity Forum organization, says the not-for-profit organization also intends to hold a forum in Fiji at the end of February 2019 and is lining up details for another Plasticity Forum in Paris in April 2019.

A blog post for the upcoming Malaysia event indicates plastic labels on packaging will be one of several points of discussion at the October forum.

A presenter from United States-based Avery Dennison will be on hand to discuss how labels lend color, branding, bar code tracking and legally required information to packaging. However, even in packaging recycling processes, “much of the time, the label is removed, and discarded as waste.”

Avery Dennison indicates it has earmarked label waste as a top strategic challenge in its 2025 sustainability goals, and at the Labelexpo 2018 event in suburban Chicago, the company’s corporate display used panels made from 50 percent consumer label scrap.

In its blog post, the Plasticity organization says label a beverage bottle’s “logistics possible with all the information needed to make a safe and happy customer.” When it comes to recycling labels at the end of a product’s life, the potential to recycle “means thinking carefully about the purpose, its composition and the ability to remove it so that both the label and the plastic it serves can be recovered.”

Adds the blog post, “It is early [in] the adventure to make label waste sustainable, but thankfully industry players like Avery Dennison are looking at this issue now.”

More information on speakers and presenters at the Plasticity Forum in Malaysia can be found on this web page.