To buy or not to buy, this is the question. 

With recycling processes in place for most of Norfolk's household and commercial waste materials, we're often asked, "What is the best material to purchase?" This is a multi-faceted question with a range of feasible answers. Each decision has pros and cons, so let's discuss them!

We'll start with plastic. Plastic is the public enemy number one. Historically, recycling has been notoriously difficult and is often lumped into the 'too hard' basket. Luckily for Norfolk, we have a process that CAN recycle plastic into a useful development product for use in the community. The benefit of choosing plastic packaging is that we can recycle it on island, meaning we don't have to pay any export costs.
There are many downsides to choosing plastic, but here are a few… our plastic recycling process is the end of the line for plastic. After turning it into Resin8 aggregate, it is no longer a pure polymer, diminishing its ability to be infinitely recycled. Choosing plastic also increases its demand, meaning that more crude oil needs to be extracted from the earth for its creation. 

Moving onto steel and aluminium, we have two very different but equally versatile metals. These metals are used for many things in our everyday lives, but today, we're focusing on how they're used in the food packaging industry. Think cans of baked beans or tomatoes, soft drinks or alfoil. So many different uses! Both aluminium and steel can be recycled indefinitely! They are usually smelted into a liquid form and then refined to remove impurities. After refining, they can be cast into ingots or other moulds, or rolled into sheets. New products can be created over and over again. The plus side to aluminium and steel is its high resource recovery rate and infinite recyclability. The only downside is that we're unable to recycle them on Norfolk. However, the export cost is usually balanced by the money we make from the recycling companies. 

Compostable packaging is next on the list. Certainly better than plastic as we can compost it here on Norfolk and turn it back to the earth. However, making compostable packaging is still a resource heavy operation. And layer greenwashing on top of that, it can be so hard to discern the ‘real deal’ from the wannabees! If you’re grabbing takeaways, choose compostable over plastic, but best of all, BYO container!

And last but certainly not least, let's talk about glass! Choosing glass food packaging is excellent for several reasons. The glass will not leach any nasties into your food. You usually get a jar or a bottle that can be reused repeatedly, and we're also recycling glass here on Norfolk! We're making glass sand from all glass waste. This recycled sand is readily available for the community’s use and has the potential to greatly alleviate the pressure put on our sand dune ecosystem. Norfolk’s sand has historically been mined from the very limited dunes in Kingston, they play a vital role in our ecosystems. By choosing glass packaging, and later recycled glass sand for your projects, we can protect this threatened environment.

We hope this has helped with your 'to buy or not to buy' questions. In order, our preferences for food packaging are: glass, metal, compostables and then plastic! If you have the privilege of choice, this is what we recommend. 

Thaenks f aklan

Lil, Dan, Mandi, and the Revolve Your World team