Take steps against climate change with ecostore Company’s new Carbon Capture™ Paks

New Zealand manufacturer found some other uses for Brazilian sugar

We’re proud to be the first Kiwi manufacturer to switch to bottles made from sugarcane plastic. If you make the switch too, by buying products with these new Carbon Capture™ packs, you can play a part in helping stop climate change.

92% of each bottle comes from sugarcane-based plastic instead of regular plastic. The renewable sugarcane crop comes to ecostore from Brazil and it’s a sustainable and fast-growing crop.

The ethanol in the sugarcane is dehydrated to make ethylene, then polymerised to become polyethylene – the plastic made from sugarcane. That’s what we use to make into our plastic bottles.

These new packs can be recycled in the same way as any high-density polyethylene (HDPE) #2 bottle. Right now 98% of our bottled product is changing to sugarcane-based HDPE and because it’s just a matter of time before the technology evolves, in time we’ll be able to make all our products in sugarcane-based plastic.

This new packaging has been a big achievement for ecostore and for our co-founder, ecoman Malcolm Rands.

“Plastic is one of the world’s greatest problems and for some time I have been searching for alternatives for ecostore,” he says. “Our petrochemical plastic bottles have been a real bugbear to me. Finding a safer alternative has been a priority and now with sugarcane-based high-density polyethylene (HDPE) from Brazil becoming available to ecostore, we are able to manufacture plastic bottles made from sugarcane. This is huge for me personally and for ecostore, New Zealand and the world.”

As well as reducing the need for fossil fuels, Carbon Capture™ plastic traps carbon from the atmosphere. Every 1kg of Carbon Capture™ plastic that gets produced stores as much as the equivalent of 2kg of atmospheric CO2. That compares with the 1.83kg CO2 equivalent released into the atmosphere from traditional plastic packaging.

Rands says by converting from petrochemical plastic to Carbon Capture plastic ecostore will reduce the CO2 released by almost four kilograms for each kilogram of plastic produced. It will also allow ecostore to save 639 tonnes of CO2 per year compared to using traditional plastic.

We think Carbon Capture™ packs are pretty cool because they’re a big step on our sustainability journey.

They’ll make their way onto shop shelves this month. They look the same as traditional plastic bottles, so we’ve embossed ‘Carbon Capture’ on the base and put neck tags on key packs so you can find them.

Keep a look out for them on shop shelves and visit carboncapturepak.com if you want to find out more!

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Author

Amanda Sachtleben

Source

ecostore Company Limited, press release, 2014-09-27.

Supplier

ecostore Company Limited

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