Plastic application can last up to hundreds of years. For example, a plastic crate from DW Reusables can be reused for up to 50 years and recycled up to 7 times. However, plastic applications are still perceived as a cheap disposable material. This is mainly due to the single use applications for which they are often used. Disposable packaging then ends up in streams where they can decompose into microplastics and pollute the ecosystem.
Tinne De Pooter, Marketing & Communications Director of DW Reusables states that “plastics are too valuable a material to use “one way”. That is also why DW Reusables is fully committed to reusable packaging such as beverage crates that make full use of the sustainable material properties of the plastic.
“Plastics are too valuable a material to use in one way”,
Tinne De Pooter, Marketing & Communications Director of DW Reusables
The new Fillbee packaging from DW Reusables is made from post-consumer waste. One Fillbee pack replaces 24 cardboard sixpacks and thus 144 disposable bottles. The reusable packaging is part of a closed circuit so that they can also be perfectly recycled. “This is done mainly because the customer wants to rebrand the packaging and not because they are worn out,” explains Tinne De Pooter.
The main barrier that DW Reusables encounters to develop and integrate new reusable packaging into the market is consumer behaviour. Tinne indicates that consumers have become used to throwing away rather than reusing. In order to provide an answer to this, reusable packaging systems need to be designed as user-friendly as possible.
