SUSTAINABILITY FOR
SINGLE USE ITEMS AND PACKAGING

With so many options and different information, a maze is the right image to illustrate the challenges to adopt the right sustainable practices for packaging and the single use items..

Understanding the problem

Plastic pollution is now an environmental and existential crisis.
While plastic is a great invention that supports our modern world, its cheap and convenient properties caught us unprepared to its massive usage across all sectors. It can be shaped to fit almost any purpose and last for a very long time. This is perfect for products that will be used for years and that will be easy to collect and recycle once disposed.
But plastics are not ideal for single use items and packaging that do not need such durability and that are much harder to collect or even recycle. Those are the products, trillions and trillions each years, that are responsible for the plastic waste crisis.

Finding the cure

To solve the plastic waste crisis and go from a linear to a circular economy, 2 main trends exist:

  • Recyclable products

Plastics are often blended and mixed together or with other materials to reach the technical properties needed. Because recycling is nearly impossible for this type of products, industrials are now developing single material solutions that are suitable for recycling. Plastic recycling can be very effective for certain items in regions where the collect and recycling infrastructure is well developed. But single use items and packaging are in most cases small, light weight, a mix of different materials and dirty from their usage or after being dispose. It makes it impossible to recycle and the work needed for the collection and washing is not economically viable. As a result, less than 10% out of 150,000,000 tons used each years is effectively recycled! Those numbers are mind blobbing and call for other solutions.

  • Biodegradable and compostable products

This option is most suitable to replace plastic packaging and single use items that do not fit in the plastic recycling stream. Landfills all over the world are now filled with plastic waste that will last many hundred years slowly degrading and contaminating everything. In addition, due to the nature of their purpose which is to be used in our everyday lives everywhere and at any time, that creates the conditions for many of those items to make their way into the environment with devastating results. This is why for single use items and packaging it is important to develop ecofriendly alternatives that can be easily composted if not recycled and that will degrade safely and in a short period of time in landfill and the environment.

HRK Group commitment

In 2018, the co-founders of the company Mrs. Hang and Mr. Raphael decided that to raise their family in Vietnam they would need to solve one of the biggest issue in the country, plastic pollution. Together they created H (Hang) R (Raphael) K (Kate-Linh their daughter) with the pledge to fight plastic waste for the next generations to have a chance to live in a clean world again.

Mrs. Hang comes from La Gi, a famous traditional fishing town in South Vietnam. Years after years she could witness how plastics destroyed the livelihood of the local people with a huge impact on the environment.
For many of us, childhood memories of holidays by the sea are those of paradise. The reality is that now beaches are natural garbage collectors with each waves bringing its additional load of horrible waste.

But plastics are more than a visual pollution, they are the cause for many loss of wildlife that mistake it with food. Moreover, plastics degrade slowly to micro-plastics contaminating everything, the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breath. Plastics are in our blood and now a danger to the health of the babies yet to be born.