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The Little Things Make a Difference!

6/28/2020

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OUR STORIES › GUIDESingle-Use Plastics 101https://www.nrdc.org/stories/single-use-plastics-101
**Whole article can be viewed at the link above ^
January 09, 2020 Courtney Lindwall 

​Here’s everything you need to know about the most ubiquitous (and avoidable) kind of plastic waste: the kind made to be tossed in mere minutes. 

A straw with our iced coffee, a plastic bag to carry our takeout, a wrapper on a candy bar: taken individually, each seems harmless. These modern conveniences are so ubiquitous—and so quickly thrown out—that they hardly register ur minds. But single-use plastics come with a steep environmental price—one that we’ll be paying off for millennia. Our plastic addiction is having a devastating impact on our oceans, our wildlife, and our health.
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Matt Rath/Chesapeake Bay Program

What Are Single-Use Plastics?
​
Put simply, single-use plastics are goods that are made primarily from fossil fuel–based chemicals (petrochemicals) and are meant to be disposed of right after use—often, in mere minutes. Single-use plastics are most commonly used for packaging and serviceware, such as bottles, wrappers, straws, and bags.

​Though plastic—a chain of synthetic polymers, essentially—was invented in the mid-19th century, it wasn’t until the 1970s that its popularity skyrocketed. Manufacturers began replacing traditionally paper or glass staples with lighter or more durable and affordable plastic alternatives; plastic jugs replaced milk jars, for instance. Since the 1950s, 8.3 billion metric tons of plastics have been produced, and half of that in the past 15 years alone.
There are many uses for plastic that are not only reasonable but important, such as surgical gloves, or straws for people with disabilities. But these cases make up a small fraction of single-use plastic. According to a 2017 study, more than half of non-fiber plastic, which excludes synthetic fabrics like polyester and nylon, comes from plastic packaging alone, much of which is for single-use items.
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Pallet Wrapz Safe Shipping!

6/17/2020

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Innovative ways to save our earth from plastic waste!

6/10/2020

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By Joe Iles     March 15, 2018

https://www.greenbiz.com/article/5-innovations-could-end-plastic-waste

There's no love lost for plastic packaging. Whether it's complicated recycling instructions on the products we buy, startling images of the impacts on wildlife or simply the economic value lost through waste, plastics have been climbing the international agenda for years. So how do 8 million tonnes of plastic still end up in the ocean each year?


​Searching for the right solutions
The urgency of the issue has led to brands, governments, NGOs and celebrities promoting a host of solutions. Reusable packaging is part of the answer, and shopping bags, water bottles and coffee cups have become popular purchases for those trying to do their bit. This works to replace certain types of packaging, but think about all the other pieces of plastic we come into contact with every single day. Plastic film can keep food fresher for longer, and wrappers ensure medical equipment is safe for patients. In many cases, it wouldn't be hygienic, convenient or feasible to go fully reusable.

A number of initiatives also aim to tackle the impacts of the problem, from scooping plastics out of the ocean to collecting litter from beaches. Again, these are valuable efforts and must continue. However, the three best known major international ocean clean-ups combined deal with less than 0.5 percent of those 8 million tonnes of plastics that enter the ocean annually. We need to treat the cause as well as the symptoms.This means looking upstream to design a plastics system that works, in which this material never ends up as waste in the first place.

The challenge here is that when it's used, plastic packaging becomes dispersed. These items are distributed throughout the world in endless configurations and uses, with billions of customers. They're often tiny, lightweight, difficult to collect and individually aren't worth that much. So to truly rethink the way we make and use plastics, we need to come up with new approaches and systemic solutions.
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Designing a better system
That's the thinking behind the New Plastics Economy Innovation Prize, launched in 2017 by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, together with the Prince of Wales's International Sustainability Unit, and funded by Wendy Schmidt. The competition invites designers and materials scientists to reinvent the types of plastic packaging that are almost never collected and recycled, and end up in landfill, incinerators or in the environment.

The winners are awarded a share of the $2 million prize, as well as a 12-month accelerator program, in collaboration with Think Beyond Plastic.

​The Innovation Prize comprises two parts. At the Our Ocean conference in October, the organizers announced the first batch of winning submissions. For this Circular Design Challenge, teams were tasked with coming up with superior alternatives to items such as shampoo sachets, wrappers, straws and coffee cup lids. These "small-format packaging items" account for 10 percent of all plastic packaging. They are not recycled and often end up in the environment.

Inventing circular materials
The second group of winners was announced at this year's Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. The Circular Materials Challenge seeks ways to make all plastic packaging recyclable. This means inventing better solutions than conventional packaging, and the features that we take for granted. For example, many plastic films aren't just made of one type of polymer but a range of materials all mixed up. Each material has a function — water resistance, airtightness, appearance — but they also make common packaging items unrecyclable.

"The intention is that these innovations not only inspire further progress but are adopted, scaled and integrated into a working plastics industry."

The Circular Materials Challenge invites innovators to find alternative materials that could be recycled or composted. The five winning entries show what's possible when the principles of a 
circular economy are used to guide the research and development process. The intention is that these innovations not only inspire further progress but are adopted, scaled and integrated into a working plastics industry.

1. Packaging inspired by nature
The University of Pittsburgh team applies nano-engineering to create a recyclable material that can replace complex multi-layered packaging that is unrecyclable. This mimics the way nature uses just a few molecular building blocks to create a huge variety of materials.

 2. Recyclable packaging, with help from magnets
Aronax Technologies
  Spain proposes a magnetic additive that can be applied to a material, creating better air and moisture insulation — making it suitable to protect sensitive products such as coffee and medical products, while still being possible to recycle. The additive — small, plate-like particles of silicates and iron oxide — will provide plastics with much better abilities to block gases such as oxygen, but can be identified and separated at the recycling stage.

3. Packaging from food waste
Working together, Full Cycle Bioplastics, Elk Packaging and Associated Labels and Packaging make a compostable high-performance material from renewable materials, agricultural by-products and food waste to pack a broad range of products from granola bars and crisps to laundry detergent.

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4. 'Plastic' made from wood
The VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has created a compostable multi-layer material from agricultural and forestry by-products, which could be used for stand-up food pouches for products such as muesli, nuts, dried fruit and rice.

​These wood by-products contain cellulose, the most abundant renewable polymer on the planet, making this new material an environmentally benign alternative to fossil fuel-based, multi-layered plastic packaging.
5. Compostable coatings
The Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC has developed a coating with silicate and biopolymers that can be used in many food packaging applications, protecting biopolymer packaging and food against premature degradation and is fully compostable.

The new coatings can improve the performance of bio-based and biodegradable packaging, which alone cannot guarantee the required minimum shelf life of many food products.
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The circular economy transition
"These winning innovations show what’s possible when the principles of a circular economy are embraced," said Ellen MacArthur, responding to the announcement of the winning entries. "Clean-ups continue to play an important role in dealing with the consequences of the waste plastic crisis, but we know we must do more. We urgently need solutions that address the root causes of the problem." In 2016, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation released the first New Plastics Economy report, which provided the alarming and widely shared statistic that if we don’t change how we make and use plastic, by 2050 the oceans could contain more plastics than fish, by weight. Viewers of the BBC series "Blue Planet 2" saw this concern brought to life last year, resulting in another spike in public attention.

"The recycling symbol has been around for over 40 years, but just 14 percent of plastic packaging is actually collected; only 2 percent is properly recycled."

The New Plastics Economy reports have called for a redesign of the plastics system in line with the principles of a circular economy, a shift that will require a change in mindset. Because try as we might, as a society we haven't made much progress on the plastics problem. The recycling symbol has been around for over 40 years, but just 14 percent of plastic packaging is actually collected, and of that only 2 percent is properly recycled. The rest is lost during the recycling process, or goes to lower value goods. Despite best intentions, that yogurt pot you recycled probably won't be reborn as another yogurt pot.
So the new goal, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, is "a New Plastics Economy, in which plastics will never become waste or enter the ocean in the first place."
Creating system-level change
While the winning innovations represent the type of solutions needed to build a plastics system that works, these teams cannot drive the transition alone.

That's why the Innovation Prize is part of the New Plastics Economy Initiative, an ambitious collaboration led by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, with participation from a broad group of leading companies, cities, philanthropists, policymakers, academics, students, NGOs and citizens.

Following the announcement in Davos, 11 leading brands, retailers and packaging companies are working towards using 100 percent reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging by 2025 or earlier.

Together, these bold commitments, along with the right policy incentives and demonstrators of radical innovation, provide us the best chance of creating a plastics system that works.

Emblematic of the "take, make, dispose" world we live in, if we can make plastic packaging fit within a circular economy, there's reason to believe that other industries can follow suit.


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6 best practices to improve warehouse operations

6/3/2020

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6 best practices to improve warehouse operations
LAUREN KOPPELMAN LAST UPDATED: FEBRUARY 12TH, 2020

6river.com/best-practices-to-improve-warehouse-operations/


Businesses are constantly on the lookout for ways to improve productivity, increase revenues, reduce cost and deliver better products/services to customers. One way to achieve all this is by optimizing warehouse operations.  There are many best practices that can help you improve warehouse operations. In this post, we’ll take a look at a few key best practices that can help improve warehouse efficiency.

1. Carefully design your warehouse A carefully planned warehouse layout is one of the foundations of efficient warehouse operations. While automation technology and robotics deliver great benefits, there’s no substitute for optimizing the organization of the physical space to enhance operational efficiency. In addition to minimizing travel time between picking/sorting stations, proper spacing allows for robots, machines and human associates to quickly and smoothly move inventory throughout the warehouse. The best layout for your warehouse is one that’s designed to work with your systems and processes. It should be designed with several considerations in mind — such as your fulfillment strategy, picking system, type, size and frequency of orders and overall available space — to maximize every inch of floor space. Also, it’s a good idea to review your warehouse layout periodically to ensure it meets your current operational needs and standards.

2. Properly zone your inventory Properly zoning your inventory is another effective way to increase warehouse productivity. The placement of your picking locations in relation to product storage, sorting, packing and shipping areas can make or break order fulfillment workflows. For instance, placing the most frequently picked items close to shipping areas can speed up fulfillment activities — resulting in faster shipping and more satisfied customers. Place fast-moving items in easy-to-access storage locations and store items often purchased together in proximity. This reduces travel time during picking operations. However, you also need to consider the size, storage requirements and velocity of products to determine how best to store them.

3. Implement a streamlined returns process With consumers returning at least 30% of all products purchased online, returns management has become an essential part of warehouse operations. The best way to handle this is by creating and implementing a returns process that is as efficient and process-oriented as your order fulfillment operation. Look for software solutions that have integrated returns processing capabilities. Software solutions with integrated returns processing capabilities help to store and track all returns data, enabling you to see why an item was returned, who returned it, refunds due and any associated costs. Not only does this information help with inventory management, but it also enables you to understand your customers’ buying preferences and plan accordingly.

4. Leverage the right warehouse equipment & technology
Advancements in robotics technology and warehouse management systems continue to disrupt order fulfillment and distribution operations. There is a plethora of customized software, automation solutions, and smart robots to help businesses manage the storage, movement, sorting and shipping of warehouse inventory. However, not all technologies are ideal for every warehouse operation. Aside from the significant installation, operating and maintenance costs of some warehouse automation equipment, they sometimes require a significant overhaul of existing warehouse infrastructure before they can be deployed. Your best bet is to choose a flexible, scalable and affordable solution that requires zero changes to your existing infrastructure. Collaborative mobile robots offer flexible costs and are easy to scale. Deploying them boosts productivity and accuracy at the fraction of the cost of most automation solutions. For example, one leading 3PL doubled its pick rates, improved order accuracy to 99.9% and reduced new hire training time by 10 days after implementing Chuck by 6 River Systems.

5. Track your inventory The accuracy of inventory records is one of the cornerstones of warehouse operations. Keeping a constant eye on inventory levels helps you avoid stockouts on fast-moving items or overstocking slow-moving items, which can increase long-term storage costs. Inventory tracking enables better inventory planning — you know when and how much of a product to reorder. Every modern warehouse should include inventory management software in the lineup of warehouse solutions they use. These systems must work in real-time to provide an accurate record of all goods going in or coming out of the warehouse.

6. Automate data collection Modern warehouses should use integrated solutions that support automated data collection and transfer. Tracking warehouse operations creates huge amounts of data — data that must be analyzed for logistics optimization. For instance, optimizing shipping operations in line with customers’ preferences requires the collation of data from multiple sources, including customers, orders, drivers, trucks and roads. Manually collecting such data is tedious, time-consuming and prone to human error. Automating data collection helps to eliminate human error, speeds up processes and enables data analysis and more accurate supply chain insights. Armed with real-time data and accurate supply chain insights, companies achieve a higher percentage of on-time shipments to customers. The most successful retailers have an on-time delivery rate of 97% or greater. Lastly, always have a backup plan. Identify worst-case scenarios and have contingency plans in place to enable business continuity despite setbacks. With the growing impact of the Amazon effect and rising labor shortages, businesses must do all they can to maintain/increase their profit margins while keeping customers satisfied. Implementing these warehouse operations best practices will not only keep your bottom line healthy but also boost customer satisfaction. Visit our case study to learn how one global home goods retailer increased pick rates by 62%, reduced errors and shortened new hire training time by leveraging Chuck and 6 River Systems.

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