Carbon Benefits of Industrial Packaging

Industrial Packaging is, first and foremost, designed and manufactured to be safe and secure in transport and use worldwide.

Industrial Packaging provides great benefits to the environment not only in ensuring pollution prevention but also through the benefits of such strength enabling repeated reuse of steel, plastic and composite packaging, or the natural sustainability of fibreboard packaging that originates from managed planting schemes. 

Although not widely known to the general public, there exists a world-wide network of specialist companies who recover used Industrial Packaging from their national customer base - the end-users of the packaging.

The international organisation covering these companies is The International Conferederation of Container Reconditioners (ICCR) - more details available through the European Reconditioners Association (SERRED)Website via the following link:  http://www.serred.org/icdr.html

Manufacturers and Reconditioners are now working together to ensure industrial packaging is made to work safely and efficiently with the highest environmental care. A reflection of this joint working is seen through the work of the joint European Industrial Packaging Association (EIPA) at various international standards and regulatory meetings.

This international community recover used industrial packaging from a very wide base of end-users including the Food, Pharmaceuticals, Oils and Specialty Chemicals industries. These packagings will be individually inspected to check the packaging type and residual content before segregation, cleaning and multi-option recycling processes.

The cleaned packaging can then be checked to determine the most environmentally (and economically) efficient route - utilising the following options:

1. Reconditioning for re-use as a complete maintained package by third party.

2. Recycling of materials following cleaning, destruction and segregation.

3. Recovery of the calorific energy from the packaging materials.

The above options ensure the very highest environmental efficiency is maintained through the collection of used packaging by the professional reconditioning community.

The Reconditioning process will ensure used packaging can have multiple `lives' through repeated reconditioning and re-use, with typically in excess of 5 trips being possible for individual packagings  dependant on design and product type.

With the reconditioning, inspection and testing of used packaging taking place `under one roof' this provides significant advantages (including reduced energy, fuel, emissions and transport costs) over the destructive recycling and transport to third party reprocessors.

The biggest threat to UK reconditioning is the direct scrap recycling of perfectly good, re-useable drums and IBCs, which removes the necessary feed-stocks to meet demand for reconditioned products and any chance of maintaining the packaging as a unit and the inherent savings for our environment.

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