The use of face masks during the recent pandemic has justifiably grown to hundreds of millions worldwide. However, masks can easily end up littering public places or natural sites. Metsä Board, the leading European producer of premium fresh fibre paperboards and part of Metsä Group, partnered up with a packaging design agency Futupack and corrugated board converter Capertum to manufacture a corrugated mask bin for the specific disposal of face masks. The design of the bins paid special attention to the materials used to produce the bin and the usability and disposability of the bin. Futupack is a Finnish company that designs and implements sustainable packaging solutions. “We wanted the mask bin to be as aesthetic as possible so that it could be placed easily into any indoor environment. The mask bin is delivered flat, and can be quickly assembled. In addition, full instructions on assembly for the consumers are printed on to the bin itself. When the mask bin is full, it is easy to close the lid, and the entire bin can be safely and hygienically disposed of with the incinerated waste,” says Jani Mäkipää, Lead Packaging Engineer at Futupack.

Is packaging wasted? Well, certainly, some packaging is. But it depends upon your definition of waste. If a metal can is placed into the general waste stream, for example, then yes, it is wasted. If it enters into the recycling stream, then perhaps the consumer sees it as a waste product sent for recycling, but the item itself is far from wasted. In the case of metal, its properties are such that it can be recycled indefinitely without any degradation in quality, which creates what we call a circular economy. Provided the key elements of the circle are all performing their specific duties, it is a truly sustainable model. We have known this for some time, but what is perhaps less known is that food waste has a greater impact on the environment than packaging waste. Although the latter must of course be given our full attention, the former must also be looked at closely to ensure we are not ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ – so to speak.

At the Environment Council meeting, on June 17th, one of the topics on the agenda was support for recyclers in the current economic context, and the focus was on the plastic recycling sector and the textiles recycling sector. From the recycling industry, we have been highlighting the challenges we are facing now in various ways during recent months. One example is the meeting in May with Jessika Roswall, European Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy, that our CEO Andreas Malmberg participated in. It was arranged by Plastics Recyclers Europe (PRE) and based on a position paper outlining six strategic areas for immediate action to prevent the collapse of the European plastics recycling industry. Also, the European Recycling Industries’ Confederation (EuRIC) has drawn attention to the challenges and issued a “EU Plastics Recyclers’ Roadmap: For a competitive & innovative industry” with concrete proposals, such as for example introduction of incentives, whether market or tax-based, and establishing harmonised EU End-of-Waste (EoW) criteria for plastics. The EU Plastic recycling sector is reducing EU’s dependence on primary raw materials and decreasing carbon emissions, both compared to primary raw materials and to incineration. The recycling sector is also taking care of plastic waste in a more sustainable way due to our high standards in the EU. With the new restrictions on plastic waste exports, a well-functioning market for recycled plastics in the EU is imperative.