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A year ago, a food safety expert at the University of Guelph claimed that using reusable plastic crates (RPCs) to ship food in Canada was “a recipe for disaster”.[1] The claim made headlines even as Dr. Keith Warriner, Director of Food Safety and Quality, freely acknowledged that the data he used to derive his conclusion […]

One of the prime aims of the Ontario government when it passed the  Waste Diversion Act of 2002 was to regulate and secure industry funding for the province’s popular Blue Box program. The deal, a typical political compromise, was for Blue Box financial responsibility to be shared 50/50 between industry stewards and municipalities. The hoped-for

Actions always speak louder than words but a document coming out of the UN climate summit last week has the potential to halve the world’s natural forest loss within six years, and to end it within sixteen. The New York Declaration on Forests is a non-legally binding political agreement that has been endorsed by 32

We have just launched a new website on the environmental attributes of paper boxes, but boy did we have a time before settling on what exactly to call it. You wouldn’t think there could be so many different names for what basically is a similar type of packaging material, but it’s a fact. There’s boxes,

The plastic industry has made no secret of the fact that it would like to burn over a million tonnes of currently “non-recycled” plastics in Ontario alone[1] . In strategic terms this would remove a major solid waste problem (some 73% of residential plastic packaging in Ontario, for example, ends up in landfill)[2] , while

The US-based environmental group, Upstream, has quietly changed the numbers in its Waste of Forests campaign, correcting the error that inflated its packaging waste claim by about 30 per cent (Upstream misses the boat). We remain hopeful that the group will also change its misleading view of how recycled and virgin material are used in

Tired of wading through the hundreds of emails that have accumulated in your inbox while you were on holiday? Can’t get hold of someone because they are now away? Love the kids dearly but secretly can’t wait until school starts again and you can get back on a regular schedule? We have the answer, and the

If you want to find out more about paper packaging and the environment then set aside the morning of November 12 in Brampton, Ontario. There you will be treated to a frank State-of- the-Nation address by the executive director of the industry’s environmental council. This normally shy and diplomatic individual (who wrote this stuff?) will

There are two things that bug us about the recent packaging campaign launched by US-based environmental group, Upstream: its misleading use of data (outlined in an earlier blog) and its superficial and one-sided view of how the paper packaging industries in both Canada and the United States work. Basically what Upstream claims is that all

There’s no question that the folks at the US-based environmental group, Upstream, have their hearts in the right place. We just wish they would get all of their facts straight. The group recently launched a wide-ranging campaign against packaging waste, including a section on what it calls paper-based “consumer” packaging. Upstream defines this as pretty