GPANL and How its made videos. Reflection.

I made some playlists for the videos just for easynesses sake.
Giving packaging a new life
How its made

Reflection time

The biggest thing I took from the videos was the complexity of recycling and in making packaging that can be recycled but still function effectively. It was pretty amazing seeing how all the different materials are separated using several techniques. There were magnets, spinning things, centrifuges I think, people manually sorting with just their eyes and hands. I wonder how effective it is in doing the sorting though. Surely plenty of pieces would get through and end up contaminating the wrong material. The point though is that recycling is bloody tough and a lot of energy goes into it, and sometimes it just leads to ‘downcycling’, where the original product can’t be used for its original purpose and it becomes an inferior material. Eventually the material will get to a point where it was no use and must be disposed.

So people, remember recyclability is not the be all and end all of sustainability. It’s energy intensive. Rather look for ways to make the products last longer, or just dispose them so they turn into plant food (see cradle to cradle). Also remember that making packaging that can be recycled effectively but still be functional is exceptionally difficult. I was thinking of the tetra-pak, the paper gets recycled into waste paper, the plastic and aluminium go into concrete production, so the plastic and aluminium don’t actually get turned back into plastic and aluminium.

Also imagine these recycling machines in poorer countries, it just wouldn’t happen any time soon. You first need an effective garbage disposal network, then you need the power and water to go into the machines as well as the machines themselves. Also the people would need the education of sorting what can be recycled and what cant, people in Australia don’t even know that let alone in less developed nations. Sometimes I wonder about why we have a trash bin and recycling bin. People put wrong stuff in the recycling bin anyway and it has to be sorted, so why not just pour everything into it, that way stuff in the trash bin that could be recycled will be recycled instead of going into the trash. Im guilty of throwing away stuff that can be recycled in the trash bin, purely due to laziness. Maybe here it is too expensive to have a machine that can handle that? I dunno.

It was good to see that Aluminium cans, Tin cans, glass bottles and PET can all be properly recycled so that they don’t end up becoming inferior products. But for other products there needs to be a better way. Bio polymers could become an important part of packaging. They could be thrown away after use and decompose in landfills, which can then capture gas for electricity production. The bio-polymers are made from renewable sources, so throwing them out wouldn’t be so bad. Its actually exciting for me when I see bio-polymers used in real life, Ive been interested in them for a while, so to see them used in real-life is kinda cool.