Pack to the future with sustainable packaging

Packaging and the impact one time use packaging has on the environment is at the forefront of the sustainability debate in Britain today. We use it to protect and preserve food as well as using it in transport and as a means of displaying nutritional information to the people buying the food.

 

Last Thursday, the Museum of Brands in Notting Hill, opened a new display called Pack to the Future, which focuses on the issue of sustainable packaging.

 

The purpose of this display is to not only raise awareness of the dangers packaging poses to our environment – as if David Attenborough didn’t highlight that enough in Blue Planet II – but to also offer solutions to stop the amount of non-disposable packaging ending up in landfill.

 

One of the biggest culprits of one-time use packaging is the disposable coffee cup. Some retailers such as Starbucks and Pret are taking in a step in the right direction by offering customers money off their morning coffee if they bring in a reusable cup.

 

James Cropper who is exhibiting at the Museum of Brands is one of the first inventors to develop solutions to the disposable cup crisis. His company, CupCycling is based in the Lake District and they are responsible for creating sustainable packaging solutions for brands such as Selfridges and Lush. Using this sustainable initiative, Cropper has worked with the department store to upcycle the disposable cups used in the foodhall and office, turning them into paper which is used to create the iconic yellow Selfridges shopping bag.

 

Recycling is a well-established norm in society today but seeing as there is no standard national recycling system, local governments are responsible for the recycling in their patch, so no one is sure whether or not some materials can be recycled.

 

There has always been confusion around whether or not some things can be recycled or not and disposable coffee cups have always been a contentious one. The material that makes coffee cups so hard to recycle is the inner polyethylene liner which is responsible for keeping the cups waterproof and not turning into a mulchy mess. In order to recycle the cups properly the different materials need to be separated.

 

Pack to the Future will be running for …. For more information, head over to the website at http://www.museumofbrands.com.