Recycle, reuse and repurpose

Mailbox recycled return trip packing goes round again

When it comes to plastic, ‘end-of-life’ no longer has to mean end-of-life, just the end of one life and the start of another! Many companies around the world are moving away from the linear ‘take-make-waste’ economy in favour of the circular alternative, where everyday products are recycled, reused and repurposed. This reduces waste and pollution by cycling materials back into the economy, which is better for us all.

However hard you try, and however good your intentions, waste can be hard to avoid. At Mailbox, we’re always working hard to understand waste generated by us and our customers, and to develop ways to turn that waste back into useful material. It’s not always easy, but we know it’s worthwhile. As well as being more environmentally responsible, it future-proofs against resource scarcity, volatility and fluctuating prices.

Rethinking Return Trip Packing (RTP)

RTP is a great way to get the most value from plastic materials handling solutions like boxes and crates. It may have a higher upfront cost than one-trip corrugated cardboard boxes, but as well as offering greater protection of contents, it can be used repeatedly and is easy to clean and store.

We’ve been manufacturing and supplying RTP to clients from across the sectors for many years. In 2023, we decided to take the range one stage further and experiment with producing and blending high quality, recycled food-grade RTP.

Combining the benefits of RTP with those of a wider programme of plastic recycling is a double sustainability whammy. Collecting plastic containers that have reached the end of their life and giving them a fresh start as something else supports both our environmental targets and those of our customers.

The challenge

Recycled food-grade polypropylene (PP) exists but it’s difficult to source. To fully commit to manufacturing direct food-use RTP, we needed to source a suitable recycled material to blend with Virgin material at our own onsite manufacturing facility.

The first stage was finding enough end-of-life plastic material to test and trial. We approached PPS Midlands, a long-standing Mailbox bale arms crates client, for help. Joanne Lee, the Group Managing Director, was very enthusiastic about the project, fully appreciating its value as part of our wider sustainability strategy, and agreed to let us have a large number of end-of-life crates. In return, if successful, we would provide new trays with a percentage of suitable recycled material blended with Virgin material.

Joanne says: “At PPS, sustainability is at the heart of everything that we do. Our returnable packaging services, including pooling, rental and washing, are designed to support our customers to create a more sustainable supply chain. We have over 2 million crates in our pool, moving within fast-paced supply chains, so they do at times get damaged. As part of our strategy to reduce waste, our first action is always to repair them and return them to our pool, but once they’ve reached the end of their life, we ensure they’re recycled. When Mailbox approached us with the opportunity to use our end-of-life crates to produce food-grade recycled material and manufacture new PPS crates, it was the perfect solution.”

We collected the crates and, combining our expertise with PPS Midlands’ material, took everything to our facility to try various recycling processes. After experimenting with different blends, our Technical Director's research proved successful - thorough analysis of the finished plastic confirmed that Mailbox 30% reprocessed PP blended well with 70% Virgin PP and formed the perfect bale arm crate base.

Success!

The next stage was to approach an established testing house to carry out migration testing. Migration testing determines whether chemical substances from plastic and polymeric packaging products are transferred to the food. The testing successfully confirmed that the process we’d developed had worked, and the new plastic was certified as complying with EU Regulations.

We set out to show we had the in-house skills to turn end-of-life food-grade PP base products into reborn food-grade RTP – and we succeeded.