There is nothing like smelling a forest filled with beautiful plastic pine trees on a cool fall day. Wait. OK how about going green by planting five plastic trees for everyone you cut down? No, that doesn’t work either.
The point? No matter how many “green” and “recycled” labels you slap on petroleum-based plastic products, they cannot and will never be as renewable as paper. Unlike trees, oil and gas don’t put C02 back into the atmosphere and trees are a homegrown product that unlike plastic are not beholden to the ups and downs of oil and gas prices.
If it is both more environmentally friendly and often more affordable, why aren’t more things made out of paper? One of the main reasons has always been that plastic outperforms paper at some tasks, like waterproofing and sealing.
At Sierra, thanks to our innovative technology and methods we are bridging this ever-shrinking performance gap everyday. Sierra is able to coat the back or front of paper in order to enhance its ability. A great example is food and cleaning product packaging. Sierra can create water barriers and heat sealed packages, all with our state-of-the-art recyclable coatings. It is hard to be more “green” then replacing PVC and other plastics with recyclable paper.
One of the other benefits to using paper is that major retailers like Walmart are now demanding that products reach very high standards of recyclability. The Walmart Sustainability Index grades the “Greenness” of products, if you don’t get a high enough index score, your product will not end up on the shelves of the world’s biggest retailers, and no one can afford for that to happen! Once again, the solution is paper, and thanks to Sierra, you can now easily replace plastics with coated paper products and suffer no fall-off in quality.
The next time you think you have no choice but to use hard or impossible to recycle plastics in your packaging, think again.
Think Green. Think Affordable. Think Effective. Think Paper.