Giving Packaging New Life

This series is all about the recycling and reuse of materials in the packaging industry. It covers everything from recycling paper, Tetrapak, tinplate, aluminium, glass and most importantly plastics. The series also covers innovations in the recycling world through new methods of sorting and separation. A video like this can be very useful for designers to watch as sustainability is becoming more and more necessary when designing and manufacturing. As a designer I will be more aware of how my product is constructed and what materials are used so when it comes to the end of a products life it may be easily separated and sorted for recycling. We see in this video the differences between recycling different types of packaging. The video on paper recycling shows us that ink and other impurities must be removed prior to pulping. While paper is recycled easily other materials such as Tetrapak must be processed to separate paper from aluminium and plastic. Some materials use innovative separation techniques such aluminium which is magnetised to sort them, this allows it to be easily melted down and turned into sheets which require only one twentieth of the energy needed for the production of new goods. Glass is also a material that has to be sorted and separated as coloured glass and impurities such as ceramic can hinder the recycling process. Innovations in technology have made this process much more viable, computer light readers can pick up coloured glass as small as 15mm and compressed jets blow these unwanted parts away immediately. Plastics are one of the most important materials to be recycled within the packaging industry and require the most sorting. Before technological sorting equipment majority of plastics ended up in landfill or were incinerated. With the aid of sorting innovations plastics can be separated into bottles, films, PET, expanded polystyrene and mixed plastics. These different plastics are then recycled individually. As a designer knowing these recycling techniques is very important, as they can be implemented into our own designs by using materials or manufacturing methods that make the sorting and separation of our products easier at the end of the life cycle. The three take home messages for this video series would be to design with recyclable materials, design with sorting and separation techniques in mind and try to minimize use of different materials within the one product. All of these are done to make the recycling process at the end of a products life easier, more effective and more efficient. Designing with these things in mind should make a more sustainable and more environmentally sound future.