Education

Our goal is to educate people about plastics and how to minimize their impact on the environment. To date, our team has given many talks around the globe about these issues to help our audiences further their understanding. Since the onset of COVID, we’ve changed our approach and are now sharing with our audience online.

The facts about plastics are stunning. Did you know:

Only 9% of plastics ever get recycled?

There are over 95,000 different types of plastics available in the US alone, while our recycling system symbols only have 7 categories.

Very few plastics are just made with plastic. Generally, there are other elements that help the material meet specific performance characteristics, such as flame retardants to help reduce fires, UV additives for products used outdoors and fillers like calcium carbonate to help reduce the cost of the material.

Instead of plastics, we can choose to focus on sustainable alternatives:

Products designed with less plastic are a sustainable win, plus many biomaterials produce better + stronger products, which allows us to design lighter parts with up to 20-30% less weight and 50-100% less plastic than they’d traditionally have.

According to CleanTech Group, up to 85% of plastic-based products can now be made with biomaterials. Let’s work together and lead that change!