Sustainable Green Packaging

Sustainable Packaging

Here at Green Living Australia, we are making every effort to make our packaging as sustainable and green as possible. We are working with several packaging manufacturers to replace as much plastic packaging as possible with greener options. Your help with this would be invaluable. If you have heard of or are aware of any packaging products we could use as an alternative to our current plastic packaging, please let us know.

Plastic Bags

The packaging industry is working hard to come up with solutions to the growing public demand to eliminate plastic bags from use. We have been looking at several emerging options, however, there are a few parameters to consider in any replacement for plastic bags:

• Product visibility
• Packaging strength
• Moisture barrier
• Ability to handle storage in a freezer
• Food Safety

Where we can we are moving away from plastic packaging and here is a great example. 

Our Twist Top preserving lids are now being packed in brown paper bags which are biodegradable. This idea came from customer feedback and has received an overwhelmingly positive response.

Recycled Kit Boxes & Paper Tape

The boxes we use for our kits are all made from recycled cardboard and we are currently trialling the suitability of using paper tape to seal the kit boxes.

The boxes are purchased from a packaging company less than two kilometres from us. The cardboard is processed, recycled and manufactured into boxes less than 25 kilometres from our Underwood location. These boxes have a very low carbon transport footprint.

Plastic based tapes are not biodegradable which impacts the ability to recycle this cardboard again. We also think the paper tape just looks better.

Shipping Boxes

We reuse and recycle as many of the boxes we receive goods and deliveries in as we can. Where possible we even purchase second-hand boxes from our local packaging supplier, Logan Packaging.

Bubble Wrap

We stopped using bubble wrap entirely in our packaging.

Cardboard Packaging

Check out our cardboard recycling machine. Used cardboard that would usually be thrown in the recycling bin is run through this machine to produce a great protective packaging material that is fully biodegradable. This is one of the reasons we have been able to use less bubblewrap.

Cardboard is fed into the machine on one side and this great protective, packaging material comes out the other side.

This machine honeycombs the cardboard that would otherwise go in the recycling machine. As you can well imagine this makes a great packaging material that can be composted if not reused.

Recycling Our Packaging

We have recently updated our address label to remind everybody to recycle our packaging.

We had recently trialled some supposedly bio-degradable plastic products including bubble wrap but the product has been banned in several parts of the world due to it only degrading and turning into microplastics. The sad thing is that many councils do not allow soft plastics to be placed in recycling bins. We have been making the effort to take our soft plastics to our local Coles or Woolworths which do have soft plastic bins.