Page 8 - Packaging News Magazine Nov-Dec 2021

8 NEWS |
www.packagingnews.com.au | November-December 2021
Recycled beverage cartons to build Aussie walls
Everyday waste, including beverage cartons and coffee cups, is turned into walls.
saveBOARD co-founder and CEO Paul Charteris says making high-performance low- carbon building materials using 100 per cent recycled materials from everyday waste will trans- form the construction industry in Australia.
“It will enhance the construction industry’s drive towards more sus- tainable construction practices,” Charteris said.
The first Australian save- BOARD plant will reprocess liquid paperboard beverage containers, including both aluminium-lined aseptic packages and non alumin- ium-lined containers collected through the container deposit scheme and coffee cups collected through the Simply Cups recy- cling program. It will also source material from document recycling company Shred-X.
Together with supplemen- tary material from industrial processes, these items will be used to manufacture high-per- formance low-carbon building products to substitute plaster board, particle board, and ori- ented strand board (OSB) that can be used for interior and exte- rior applications.
The saveBOARD process uses heat and compression to bond materials, cutting the need for glues or other chemical additives, to produce a clean product with zero volatile organic compounds (VOCs), suitable for use in homes and commercial buildings. ■
BEVERAGE packaging waste, like cartons and coffee cups, will soon be a prime building material, allowing Australian builders to replace plywood, particle board, and plaster board with low car- bon, environmentally sustainable construction boards.
Packaging waste innovator save- BOARD Australia has received a $1.74m grant from the federal and NSW governments towards setting up a $5m facility that will see the company convert beverage packag- ing waste into high performance building materials.
The project is funded by the Australian government’s Recycling Modernisation Fund and the NSW government’s Waste Less, Recycle More initiative.
The project is expected to fuel
confidence in a new market for recycled construction materials, akin to roads made from recy- cled glass, or label liners being converted into insulation mate- rial for building. This, in turn, will enable more packaging to become 100 per cent recyclable/ reusable, in line with the 2025 National Packaging Targets.
“This is a prime example of the collective impact model in practice, which will help estab- lish a manufacturing capacity in Australia. Led by industry with the support of government, APCO will continue to sup- port this type of collaboration as we work to transition to a circular economy for packag- ing,” said Brooke Donnelly, Australian Packaging Covenant
Organisation (APCO) CEO.
The project marks the first collaboration between Tetra Pak and SIG Combibloc in Australia under the umbrella of the Global Recycling Alliance for Beverage Cartons and the Environment (GRACE), and is a joint initiative with saveBOARD and its support- ers Freightways and Closed Loop. “This partnership will create a stable domestic end market for used beverage cartons. The suc- cess of this recycling solution will depend on support from state government and local coun- cils to ensure beverage cartons are kept in kerbside recycling, so we have sufficient volumes of feedstock to make this local solution viable,” said Tetra Pak
Oceania MD Andrew Pooch.
Shipping challenges push consumables costs up
PACKAGING businesses are facing increased costs as soaring ship- ping charges send prices of many consumables, including board and labelstock, up again
The country’s largest distribu- tor of printable materials, Ball & Doggett, has recently introduced another range of rises across its products, with Spicers set to increase its prices “imminently”, and others sure to follow.
Shipping is becoming a major issue for the local economy, as capacity is constrained, and
availability is dictated by spot pricing, which does not favour Australia or New Zealand. In recent weeks US traders have been outbidding everyone else, sending a significant amount of shipping capacity that would have come here over to the US instead.
Freight costs have risen by dou- ble digit percentages in just the past month, on what were already sky-high prices that have doubled, tripled or quadrupled over the past year. Local merchants are having to pay at least $3000 or $4000 more
for their containers this year than they were a year ago.
Tony Bertrand, marketing manager at Ball & Doggett said, “US companies are paying top dollar, which is causing vessels to be diverted from coming from Singapore to Australia over to the States.”
David Martin, CEO at Spicers, said, “It’s hard to keep up with changing prices, but we can’t see them going down anytime soon, rather they look set to keep rising.” ■
Soaring shipping costs drive up costs of board and labelstock.