The devastating effect of our over-dependence on plastic has received at long last the coverage it deserves in the national and international press.
The world is finally waking up to the irreversible damage the use of plastic is having on our planet. David Attenborough’s Blue Planet, last year highlighted the amount of plastic that’s currently contaminating our oceans. Blue Planet showed how plastic is so common in our waters that it is being consumed by various sea creatures.
Over the years we have become wrongly dependent on plastic in most western societies. It is cheap to produce and ship and sturdy enough that it is multipurpose.
The vast majority of the plastic we use is single-use and it rarely gets recycled.
Once the plastic is disposed of it remains out there in the environment, where it contaminates our soil and seas.
A single plastic bag, for example, is estimated to take up to 100 years to disintegrate and shockingly only 9% of all plastic is ever recycled.
The global discussion on plastic has got all businesses big and small thinking about how they may be contributing negatively to the levels of plastic out there in the environment. Whilst most can’t eradicate their use of plastic completely, there are certain ways of minimising the volume that’s being used.
Here at BLL, we were keen to do our own bit to help in the reduction of plastic use.
We looked at our product range and assessed the creative ways in which we could tweak certain products or procedures, in order to contribute to the need for plastic reduction.
We decided to commit ourselves to reducing the plastic in our lever arch binders. The leaver arch files are used primarily by lawyers, to store their files and paperwork. Originally produced as a PVC product, we moved to a paper-based equivalent, comprised mainly of gloss lamination and polypropylene, as opposed to clear and opaque PVC.
The original PVC product was made up of 2 sheets of opaque PVC and an A4 pocket of clear PVC. The weight of the plastic excluding the spine ticket pocket was 194.2 g
The new paper-based equivalent is made up of gloss lamination film and an A4 pocket of clear polypropylene. The weight of plastic in the product, excluding the spine ticket pocket, is 18.5 g
This is a reduction of 175.7 grams of plastic, resulting in an overall 90% reduction in plastic in this product.