How To Reduce Your Waste Outdoors And Recycle With Flexible Packaging

As a family, we have started to do more things to help reduce our waste and carbon footprint. By living more sustainably and doing our part to recycle certain materials more, this has helped tremendously. Because we enjoy taking many road trips and camping trips, it is important to me to bring a few simple meals that I can buy in flexible packaging. A big bonus is that flexible packaging can be upcycled and reused. Getting in the habit of recycling is important because it reduces the amount of material that goes into landfills every day.

When we go shopping for our road trips and camping trips, finding more sustainable packaging solutions is my number one priority! If it’s not something I can buy in bulk, then I make sure that the packaging is sustainable and will have a positive environmental footprint once discarded.

By reducing our consumption to only the things we need, reusing as much as possible and recycling made from flexible packaging, we can succeed with our current recycling issue and improve greenhouse gas emissions.

 More people are starting to change the way they live by becoming more conscious of the things they buy because of its benefits to our economy, community and the environment. So, let’s talk about what those benefits are.

Living a lifestyle where you are reducing your waste is so beneficial to the economy, the environment, and your pockets! Here are a few benefits:

Environmentally

·       Conserves resources

·       Reduces pollution

·       Reduces our climate impact by reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are contributing to our global warming issue

Economically

·       No more food waste

·       Supports a circular/regenerative economy and creates more jobs

·       Buying quality products

·       Buying less

When we buy certain foods in flexible packaging, there are a number of ways that it can be recycled. Many curbside recycling programs don’t currently accept all kinds of recyclables, so it is great that there are many local store drop off programs to help make the recycling process easier. The good thing about flexible packing is that about 50% of the plastic packaging is easily recycle through these store drop-off programs. There are also a number of flexible packaging recycling initiatives that are available and constantly expanding every year.

o   The Wrap Recycling Action Program (WRAP) is a national public awareness and outreach initiative designed to make plastic film – including wraps, bags, and flexible packaging – a commonly recycled material with a strong and ever-growing recycling rate.

o   The Materials Recovery for the Future (MRFF) pilot program demonstrates that with adequate optical sorting capacity and peripherals, flexible plastic packaging can be efficiently captured in a large single-stream material recovery facility and processed into a commodity bale for reuse in a variety of markets.

o   The Hefty®EnergyBag® program establishes a way to collect otherwise hard-to-recycle plastics, like candy wrappers and foam to go containers, at curbside and uses them as valued resources.

Changing your lifestyle to a more sustainable one can definitely be a challenge, especially when it comes to learning how to minimize your environmental impact, but if you start with writing your ‘why’ down then it will give you even more reason to accomplish it. Not one person can change the world, but if everyone is slowly making an impact then we can save our planet.