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In today’s business world, technology often comes together with strong consumer awareness, and isolated and fiercely competitive corporate initiatives are increasingly being replaced with transparent cooperation and exchange.
As a result, more and more companies are looking to work together in different forms, including anything from mutual coopetition in which they collaborate with competitors to improve the outcome for all parties involved, to strange and completely unexpected partnerships that defy conventional wisdom and take whole industries by storm.
The colossal plastics industry is one such industry that is experiencing rapid transformation due to unlikely collaborations and is transforming a variety of industries such as fashion, food and fossil fuel.
The Plastics Industry
Plastics have a bad reputation. They are pointed at as one of the main culprits of environmental degradation – and not for no reason. A recent study by the University of Georgia’s College of Engineering estimated that globally, more than 280 million tons of plastic is produced per annum, and only a meager 10% of this amount is recycled. In 2010 alone, over 4.8 million metric tons of plastic entered our oceans just from people living within thirty miles of the coastline.
It sounds bleak, but with today’s technology, resources, and companies’ growing openness to new approaches and partnerships, the numbers also mean that there’s tremendous untapped potential for change.
From package redesign to biomaterials, there is huge untapped potential for change in plastics. Click To TweetThere are countless ways the enormous plastics industry can be part of the solution. From package redesign, sustainable plastics, new and innovative recycling techniques, use of biomaterials in unique ways and more, the way plastic is consumed can change – if only companies work together to bring about that change.
With innovative and scalable collaborations well underway, plastics companies are creating unlikely collaborations, bringing in new materials, ideas and greener goals than what they could have achieved alone.
As the plastics industry continues to evolve, companies from completely different sectors have collaborated with plastics conglomerates in order to transform the industry. By pooling their resources and leveraging each other’s strengths, these seemingly unrelated brands have been able to make a noticeable difference in the industry in need of change.
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New Footwear Turns an “Impossible” Idea into Reality
With more than 20 billion shoes manufactured every year, the environmental impact of the footwear industry can’t be ignored much longer. While emphasis has mostly been on recycling used shoes, a London-based company, Vivobarefoot, took a proactive approach and decided to change the materials that go into making shoes.
Forming a strange alliance, Vivobarefoot partnered with the San Diego-based eco-materials manufacturer Bloom. Bloom will provide Vivobarefoot with EVA foams that are made from algae biomass harvested from fresh water sources – a first in the industry – and cleaning up these waters in the process. The result is an eco-friendly, easily biodegradable shoe.
Each pair of men’s shoes made with this technology will return 57 gallons of clean water to the environment and reduce carbon dioxide. There’s so much algae in the world that billions of pairs of shoes can be made – but perhaps, for now, simply getting people to rethink what makes a shoe is a big enough accomplishment in itself.
From Waste to Valuable Furniture Materials
Furniture and furniture materials are the least-recycled items in every household. To change the course and encourage more environmentally-friendly behaviors, the Ikea Group, the international furniture and home supplies giant, has recently partnered with Neste, a pioneer in oil refining and renewable solutions.
Together, the unexpected duo will work to turn waste into furniture materials and ensure that key parts of IKEA’s product range can easily be recycled. The two companies hope to achieve this goal by replacing virgin fossil feedstock with renewable or recycled waste. In other words, using bio-based plastics to produce furniture.
The global impact can be enormous – Ikea has 340 stores in 28 countries, boasts 711 million total visits to its stores (2015), and 1.9 billion visits to its online store. With Neste’s annual production capacity of two million tons, the two companies can reach millions of homes worldwide.
Making Chocolate an Unguilty Pleasure
With delicious nougat, caramel and peanuts, no wonder the Snickers bar has annual global sales of $2 billion. Only in the United States, 400 million Snickers bars are sold every year – which means 400 million plastic wrappers go to waste, just in the U.S.
But it’s not just Snickers. Most of our favorite chocolate and candy bars are wrapped in materials that go into the landfill – they are too difficult to recycle. Wanting to switch to a bioplastic alternative, Mars, the company behind the Snickers bar, began looking for innovative solutions in unlikely places.
Mars teamed up with the Dutch bioplastics producer Rodenburg, who provided a compound made of starch derived from potato cutting waste. The biomaterial was then processed into film by the Dubai-based Taghleef, creating a fully eco-friendly and functional wrapper, winning the three companies a Global Bioplastics Award.
Toward a Circular Economy of Plastics
Grassroots organizations have been the driving force behind large companies stepping out of their usual comfort zones and partnering up with others in such innovative ways. Consumers, non-profit organizations, AgTech startups and even some governmental bodies are seeking change, and it is up to the plastics companies to meet their demands.
Such demand from the bottom-up helps innovative ideas and technology to flourish, allowing unlikely collaborations between companies to create a circular economy for plastics – where everything can be reusable, recyclable, cleanable and completely profitable.
To learn about more industries going green, read How CleanTech Will Impact Smart Cities
