Plastic Packaging
- Used for last 70 years as food packaging
- Annual worldwide production = 78 million tonnes
- Worldwide production cost = $198 billion
- A 330ml plastic soft drink bottle = 18 grams; glass bottle = between 190g and 250g.
- Transporting glass bottles instead of plastics = 40% more energy
- Soft drinks plastic packaging = 20% of the total food and drink packaging
- Coca-Cola produces 38,250 tonnes of plastic packaging in the UK every year
- Coca-Cola sells more than 110 billion single-use plastic bottles every year.
Marine Litter
- 8 million metric tonnes of plastic are thrown into the ocean annually.
EU
- More than a third of the food in the EU sold in plastic packaging
- EU residents (510 million) produce around 31kg of plastic packaging waste per year per person
Cost of Packaging
- A sugarcane PLA burger box is almost twice as expensive as a polystyrene PE burger box
- A biodegradable takeaway fork made from plant starch costs 3.5 times more than a basic plastic one.
- Due to rising oil prices, recycled plastic is cheaper than virgin oil based plastic.
- A tonne of virgin PET = £1,000; a tonne of clear recycled PET = £158.
- World Economic Forum: reuse and refill measures could actually reduce packaging costs by at least $8 billion a year
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