10 years of plastic free packaging – wow!
That makes us pretty proud. But what is the difference between “normal”, single use plastic and a plastic free packaging foil?
Producing conventional plastic requires mineral oil as a raw material which needs to be exploited from deep under the earth and is brought to the surface at great expense. In the refining process, the crude oil is processed into gases, petrol and propylene. In order to get ethylene and propylene to make plastic, the crude oil has to be cracked. It is then refined and further processed into plastic pellets, which are then melted down and moulded into the respective plastic packaging. That's the short version but the bottom line is: plastic raw materials are not renewable and therefore unsustainable, and its production (and disposal) is very harmful to the environment. After all, around 556 billion litres of petroleum are used up every year to produce plastic packagings, and more than 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide are emitted annually from the production process alone.
Going from bad to worse, plastic packaging is very rarely recycled because it usually consists of many different plastics that have been processed together. Most of it just goes to landfill or gets burned, causing emission of CO2 and toxic gases.
At Lovechock, we have always been keen to avoid the highly polluting production and disposal of plastic, which led us to start searching for alternative materials for our chocolate packaging back in 2010. That’s why we started using a transparent foil made from compostable wood cellulose. We have now happily been using this alternative material for 10 years and saved a whopping 23.000 kilograms of plastic in the process! While our foil might still look like plastic to you, it is actually fully home compostable because it is made from eucalyptus tree pulp - a renewable resource from sustainable forestry. Unfortunately, our compostable foil cannot yet be industrially composted in every country which means you cannot yet dispose of it in the organic waste “green bin”. It still goes to landfill in some countries or is burned in the residual waste but at least our cellulose foil does not emit any toxic gases when burned, nor is any polluting mineral oil required for its production.
