Triple Pundit’s Jen Boynton wrote about the new collaboration with Waste Management announced at Sustainable Brands 2013 earlier this week.
Excerpt:
Bill McDonough and Waste Management Want to Kill Packaging Waste
Ever injured yourself trying to open clamshell packaging? These annoying plastic-sealed packs cover everything from batteries to electronics and are designed to eliminate theft with the unfortunate side benefit of being nearly impossible to open. Those packages not only cause deep frustration and occasional pain for consumers, they are extremely wasteful since they are impossible to recycle or reuse once you finally get them open.
Eco-Rockstar William McDonough and Waste Management want to change all that with a new partnership designed to minimize packaging waste throughout supply chains.
McDonough announced the launch of the Sustainable Innovation Collaborative at Sustainable Brands 2013. The goal of the collective is to help companies lower the packaging waste in their supply chains and repurpose the waste that does make it through.
Waste Management calls itself “North America’s leading provider of integrated environmental solutions,” with is a very fancy way of saying that they pick up and process trash, compost and recycling. So why does a garbage company prefer the moniker “integrated environmental solutions provider?” And why the heck do they care about packaging waste in supply chains? Landfills are expensive – and if materials can be recovered, sorted and resold – that liability becomes an asset.
Bill McDonough is the author of the famous book Cradle to Cradle, a leading thinker on design for sustainability, creator of the C2C product certification and Principal at the consultancy MBDC.
Said McDonough from the stage, “In [my new book] Upcycle we talk about everything as food. we don’t evenuse the word “waste” anymore because when you hear the word waste, you think about waste. So we just eliminated the concept of waste. Everything is food for something else.”
Read the full article here.
