Is plastic bad? No it is not. Low cost, ease of manufacture, plastics are used in an enormous and expanding range of products, from paper clips to spaceships. They have already displaced many traditional materials, such as wood, stone, horn and bone, leather, paper, metal, glass, and ceramic, in most of their former uses.
Is the material seen as problematic by environmental groups? It is a wrong perception. Lack of awareness and no proper mechanism of disposal has led to their thinking pattern.
The ability of plastics to be reused, recycled and recover energy at the end of the cycle has made plastic attractive, economically, socially and environmentally, says a leading packaging material manufacturer, Sunil Costa, Director/CEO of Modern Pack Lanka (Pvt) Ltd., (MPL), an ISO 9001- 2015 certified company.
The story of Modern Pack Lanka began a quarter century ago, in 1993, when Mineka Wickramasinghe, Chairman of Ceylon Biscuits Ltd (CBL) met Tan, the Chairman of Singapore based Modern Pak. A joint venture was formed and Ms Shea Wickramasinghe became the Managing Director with Ms Niska Wickramasinghe on the Board.
CBL was a huge lifeline for MPL at the start. “Today, we are with almost all the big corporates in Sri Lanka including multinationals who use disposable items for their packaging,” said the Marketing Manager Ajith Hulawe. In fact, 30% of our products are used by Sri Lankan exporters to pack products to meet the export standards. In 2015 we won Global Star award from the World Packaging Organisation for innovative packaging designs.
The cabinet decision of the 11th July, 2017 prohibiting the sale, importation of containers, plates and cups, spoons made using polystyrene has caused a little confusion among the polystyrene users. Costa elaborated; there are different types of polystyrene that can be used in different ways. Expandable polystyrene (EPS) popularly known as styrofoam and High Impact Polystyrene (HIPS) are the main types.
“We use food grade raw materials such as HIPS, Polypropylene (PP), Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) to manufacture packaging products. None of these are banned in any country and all our products are recyclable and has a value for recyclers,” he said.
Experts say that the single use expanded polystyrene (Rigifoam) containers cannot be recycled economically. The material is seen as problematic by environmental groups because it is relatively slow to biodegrade and littering results a presence outdoors. Way back in 1988, Suffolk city in the USA, banned the use of styrofoam.
Thereafter, several other cities and countries followed. With the recent Cabinet decision, Government of Sri Lanka also banned the use of polystyrene foam in Sri Lanka. The Central Environmental Authority (CEA) confirmed the ban was only for polystyrene foam (styrofoam).
Unlike the Styrofoam, HIPS can be recycled and can be used for several other applications. Recycled HIPS can be used to manufacture packaging for non food grade products. As far as we know HIPS are being used world over for the purpose of manufacturing disposable items for food packaging.
Dairy industry in Sri Lanka will collapse if the High Impact Polystyrene is ban and it will affect the entire economy of the country.
The disposing and collecting of waste is not done properly. Waste management mechanism is run well in most of the other countries. Hope we too could implement a formal system soon. Recently we noticed big giants entering the recycle industry knowing that there is a big value in post consumer waste, Hulawa said. For this to be successful people should be mindful of segregating the garbage.
People who know about the value of waste say recyclable items such as plastic cups are much better compared to paper cups which has a layer of wax to prevent the cup getting soggy and end up at the landfill via municipal collections. Recycling industrialists are not interested in these paper cups. Even the garbage collectors are not interested since there is no value. Hence we should encourage use of recyclable items. Biodegradable materials has been there in the market for sometime at a little extra cost. If the expected waste management systems could be successful to reach recycle rate of 70% to 80% like some other countries we will not require biodegradable materials. Anyway our company has already carried out tests with bio degradable materials with our existing state of the art machinery and hoping to introduce same to the market shortly, if there is a requirement, Costa said.