Mars Petcare Sheba brand to use certified circular PP from SABIC’s Trucircle portfolio.
SABIC, Mars Petcare and Huhtamaki have announced that their collaboration in pet food packaging using certified circular polypropylene (PP) from SABIC’s Trucircle portfolio has been expanded to the Sheba brand. Mars Petcare, part of Mars Inc., McClean, Virginia, has adopted a flexible film structure with SABIC PP BCT18F impact copolymer for retort pouches that are used to package Sheba wet food. The multilayer film is manufactured by Finnish company Huhtamaki.
“We are very pleased about the ongoing strategic efforts with Mars and Huhtamaki,” says Lada Kurelec, of SABIC. “The transformation of the industry towards a circular economy requires unprecedented innovation and intensive collaboration across the value chain. Together, we have set another milestone on this exciting journey.”
“Over the past year, we have been closely working with SABIC and Huhtamaki, continually testing and learning and scaling up the recycled plastic content in our pet food packs,” says Barry Parkin, chief procurement and sustainability officer at Mars Inc. “As part of our Sustainable in a Generation plan, we are committed to doing our part to help drive a circular economy, which includes redesigning our packages for circularity. The fact that we are now able to introduce recycled content into our Sheba pouches helps us accelerate our journey to achieve 30 percent average recycled content in our plastic packaging and to reduce by 25 percent our use of virgin plastic.”
In November 2020, Mars Inc. announced its goal to introduce food-safe recycled content PP into its pet food packaging.
The companies say one of the most critical issues to overcome for the joint development team were the technical challenges involved in receiving approval for the complex new packaging structure. Wet food retort packaging is associated with demanding thermal processing conditions to ensure the highest food quality and help Mars Petcare achieve its purpose of creating a better world for pets. By using material from a recycled source under the International Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC) PLUS program, it proves that under even the most challenging of packaging processed, recycled content can be safe and a reality for the future, the partners say.
Marco Hilty, president of Huhtamaki’s Flexible Packaging business segment, says, “Successfully processing recycled polymers into high-quality, easy-tear films for wet retort packaging at an industrial scale is a significant milestone in delivering on our ambition to have more than 80 percent of our raw materials renewable or recycled. This is important for consumers and in line with our ambitious 2030 strategy.”
Huhtamaki uses the certified circular polymer as a phthalate-free and gel-controlled film layer, which lends the flexible pouches high impact strength and puncture resistance even at low temperatures down to negative 20 C. For wet food packaging, the pouches must also be capable of withstanding a retort temperature of 135 C for 60 minutes. Even higher thermal resistance of up to 160 C might be needed in freezer-to-oven applications.
The union says it's protesting Shred-it for unfair working conditions and unwillingness to negotiate a fair contract.
The Teamsters, Washington, has announced that drivers and helpers for Shred-it Inc., a document destruction company based in Oakville, Ontario, have gone on strike at the company’s Trenton, New Jersey, facility to protest unfair working conditions. The Teamsters also are demanding the company meet with Teamsters Local 469 and bargain a union contract in good faith.
"This company continues to trample on the workers' rights," says Cassiba Joseph, a Shred-it driver who helped launch and lead the unionization effort. "We decided that enough was enough. We felt we had no choice but to strike."
On April 21, Shred-it workers voted to join Local 469 in Hazlet, New Jersey. Since electing the Teamsters as their bargaining representative, workers have been working on a union contract that protects workers' rights and secures fair wages. Meanwhile, the union says the company has stalled at the bargaining table in hopes that the workers will lose faith in the union. However, officials from Stericycle, Bannockburn Illinois, which owns Shred-it, say they have been working with the Teamsters since the workers unionized.
“For approximately eight months, we have been actively engaged in good faith negotiations with Teamsters Local 469 on a first time collective bargaining agreement at Stericycle's Trenton, NJ facility,” Stericycle said in a statement to Recycling Today. “Local 469 is currently in possession of proposals from Stericycle for consideration as part of the overall collective bargaining process. We remain committed to bargaining in good faith and are hopeful that representatives from Teamsters Local 469 will do the same.”
The company says it brought in additional facility workers and drivers to continue operating the facility during the strike.
Last fall, Ohio workers at Local 377 and Local 20 went on strike.
Organizations in the waste and recycling industry continue to face employment challenges with transportation fleets.
Organizations within recycling and waste management industries continue to face major challenges retaining and recruiting drivers of their transportation fleets at a particularly perilous time, as drivers are needed more than ever to continue transferring the shipment of materials to keep clients happy.
In one particular market, petroleum and liquid tankers are seeing especially difficult employment challenges in finding drivers. According to the National Tank Truck Carriers (NTTC), which represents the tank truck industry before Congress and regulatory agencies, companies that serve these markets are seeing an almost 42 percent reduction in qualified driver applicants dating back to 2019.
NTTC also has estimated between 20 and 25 percent of all tanker trucks are currently not being used because of a lack of qualified drivers.
Driver turnover rates remain inflated
While it would be easy to point to the COVID-19 pandemic as the culprit, the fact remains this has been a growing issue for several years.
For the fourth consecutive year, driver shortage remains the trucking industry’s leading concern on the overall list of challenges and concerns, according to the 2020 American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) report, "Critical Issues in the Trucking Industry."
Compensation programs are regularly discussed to attract new drivers and retain existing ones. However, recycling- and waste management-based fleets are beginning to apply other strategies for driver recruitment and retention.
Onboarding new drivers can erode the bottom line
Typically, the average cost of onboarding a new driver can exceed $10,000 for many companies. Organizations with fleets therefore have a continuous motivation for retaining their existing drivers to avoid paying a hefty onboarding expense. What they’re now coming to realize is that having drivers operate newer trucks can improve their chances of retention.
Newer trucks come with newer technology, advanced safety features and less maintenance and repair problems, which equates to less downtime and breakdowns on the side of the road. This means drivers can more frequently return home to their families at the end of the day and operate trucks on their routes with more confidence they will avoid breakdowns.
Aside from the costs to recruit drivers, simply not having enough drivers also is eating into bottom-line profits. Companies that focus on recycling and waste management are losing business to owner-operators because they don’t have enough drivers to take jobs.
“We have heard that with the high spot market trucking rates, individual owner-operators are choosing to get their own authority and take loads off the load boards,” says Bob McDowell, president and owner of Houston-based W.M. Dewey & Son Inc. “They keep 100 percent of the load revenue rather than sharing it with a trucking company. That is a bad trend for established trucking companies, which cannot increase their driver/owner-operator count.”
Advanced safety features benefit drivers and fleets
The advanced safety features found in today’s newer trucks are a significant motivating factor for drivers to remain with a particular organization or fleet. Today’s drivers enjoy comfort and safety items such as:
Companies and fleets are realizing a greater return on their investment into newer trucks when more of them are placed into service. In fact, the cost for all safety equipment (including collision avoidance, disc brakes, lane change and electronic stability control) reduces overall collision repairs and yield a return on the original safety technology investment in about 18 months (collision repairs cost avoided). These are substantial savings combined with the cost of onboarding new drivers.
Driver shortage and the retention of drivers was listed as the top two issues being faced by transportation firms according to ATRI's 2021 report. Including drivers in the conversation around safety initiatives and acknowledging their input is important for retention strategies. As more fleets and organizations replace aging trucks with newer, safer equipment on the roads, these companies realize they will keep their drivers and others on the road safer, retain their drivers at a higher rate and also enjoy substantial savings in reduced accident and litigation costs as well as lower maintenance and repair expenditures.
Ultimately, companies are paying closer attention to their overall life cycle cost management strategies in alignment with the need for reduced driver turnover and better safety measures. Refocusing truck acquisition strategies based on economic obsolescence as opposed to functional attrition is now helping industry players preserve bottom-line profit potential.
Katerina Jones is Vice President, Marketing and Business Development at Fleet Advantage, a leading innovator in truck fleet business analytics, equipment financing and lifecycle cost management.
European company invests to be able to accept more recycled-content grades at mill in Varkaus, Finland.
Finland-based paper and board producer Stora Enso says it is investing 23 million euros ($26 million) to increase scrap paper grade flexibility and recycled-content capacity at its containerboard mill in Varkaus, Finland.
The Varkaus mill makes unbleached softwood pulp and brown and white top containerboard for corrugated board, including kraftliner. In addition to unbleached softwood pulp, the mill currently uses about one-third domestic old corrugated containers (OCC) as raw material. The investment will further increase the potential use of recycled fiber at the site, says the company.
“The investment will increase the capacity of our recycled fiber site and give us the flexibility to increase the use of recycled fiber in our portfolio,” says Jarkko Tehomaa, Varkaus mill director. “The investment will also improve production efficiency through technical changes in both the board machine and the pulp mill drying machine. Also, our flexibility to offer different product grades to customers improves and the capacity of the site increases slightly.”
The Varkaus site is part of the Stora Enso Packaging Materials Division, which has among its sustainability goals to drive and enable the recycling of paperboard packaging products. Investments to add recycling capacity are a concrete way to support this goal, says the firm.
The annual production capacity of the Varkaus packaging board site is 450,000 tons. Preparatory work on the investment will start immediately, with Stora Enso anticipating the investment will be complete by the end of 2022.
The association encourages municipal solid waste officials and haulers to plan now for staffing shortages.
The Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA), Silver Spring, Maryland, has expressed concern that increased delays in solid waste collection are likely to occur over the holidays and into January. In light of these concerns, SWANA encourages municipal solid waste officials and haulers to plan now for staffing shortages.
The sharp increase in new COVID-19 cases, fueled by the highly contagious omicron variant, combined with the seasonal uptick in residential waste and recyclables associated with Christmas, could stress some solid waste collection systems, the association says.
“A substantial percentage of front-line collection workers are not vaccinated, and some may get sick from COVID in the coming weeks,” states David Biderman, SWANA executive director and CEO. “This could make it difficult for some haulers or local sanitation departments to fulfill all of their collection obligations, at the same time that residential waste and recycling volumes increase around the holidays. We urge all solid waste officials and haulers to plan for how they intend to address a shortage in collection workers.”
Many communities throughout the U.S. experienced collection delays in spring and summer 2021, as haulers and local governments experienced difficulty attracting and retaining qualified collection workers.
Earlier in December, Nashville announced it was temporarily suspending curbside recycling collection in response to staffing shortages and the bankruptcy filing of a key city waste contractor. Nashville is reassigning recycling trucks to trash collection to ensure that all trash routes are collected on schedule. Dozens of communities have temporarily suspended curbside recycling collection during the pandemic.
Nearly 300,000 new COVID-19 cases were reported Dec. 22, more than double the seven-day average. The number of new cases is expected to increase for the rest of 2021 and into January 2022.
Solid waste officials and haulers have been dealing with worker shortages, increased residential waste and evolving COVID risks since the start of the pandemic. The increased transmissibility of the Omicron variant will likely result in collection delays in some communities, and SWANA urges elected officials and the general public to be patient if agencies and haulers are forced to adjust collection schedules.