Humans had used naturally derived plastics for thousands of years, making them out of cellulose from plants, animal horns and spider silk. The modern plastics industry began in 1907, when Belgian chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland invented the first plastic resin made of synthetic materials.
“We need to completely rethink our relationship to products and how we shop. “If our mission is to eliminate waste, then recycling is not the long-term solution, it is only a Band-Aid,” says Szaky. He believes that real change will come only when people turn against the very idea of disposability. Roughly a quarter of the 348 million tons of annual plastic production worldwide now goes into packaging, according to Plastics Europe and UK conservation charity the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, making it the single biggest use of the material ahead of buildings, textiles or transportation.Įntrepreneur Tom Szaky, 37, who came up with the idea for Loop, became an authority on waste management after founding TerraCycle in 2001, a company in New Jersey that recycles difficult-to-dispose-of-items on behalf of big companies. Plastic is light, versatile, cheap and durable - allowing companies to maximise shelf life while minimising manufacturing and transport costs. Switching to glass and metal often means higher greenhouse gas emissions because of their heavier weight. “We can already see that consumers, especially younger ones, really care about sustainability issues, so to remain relevant we need to change,” says Alan Jope, the chief executive of Unilever.īut even as green campaigners want the industry to go further faster, executives warn that there are real challenges to reducing our reliance on plastics.
In what was soon dubbed the “ Blue Planet effect”, consumers began to complain about plastic forks and berate brands online for what they saw as excessive packaging. Pressure has only intensified since 2017 when the BBC nature documentary Blue Planet II showed how staggering amounts of plastic - eight million tons a year according to the US environmental advocacy group Ocean Conservancy - were ending up in our seas, killing albatross chicks and entangling sea turtles.
“I really want to show as a consumer that I don’t want any more plastic, and send a message to big companies that I’m ready to spend money to back another model of consumption that is more in line with my values.” “I’m pretty militant about it,” she admits. The concept appealed to Sartre, who uses the service to teach her seven- and nine-year-old children about how their consumption habits affect the environment. The start-up is working both with multinationals such as Nestlé, Unilever, Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo and the supermarkets that distribute their wares.
Now in trials with tens of thousands of people in Paris and across the US, the company aims to create a radically new shopping model in which packaging becomes durable, reusable, valuable and sometimes even beautiful, instead of something to be immediately thrown away. Sartre is one of the early customers of Loop, a new company that seeks to eliminate waste by teaming up with well-known brands such as Häagen-Dazs ice cream, Dove soap and Crest mouthwash to make their packaging reusable.
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