The AIP will be running a new Certified Compostable Packaging Training Course on the 10 of November and all of industry is invited to attend.
How do you select the right package to brand and protect your product, deliver it right through to your consumer, and then enable the package to be beneficially recovered? Increasingly your choice here might include a compostable pack.
Certified Compostable packaging is a potential solution to meet aspects of the 2025 National Packaging Targets, so it is vital that it is considered together with the other desirable outcomes – reusability and recyclability, as our overall aim is to achieve greater circularity for packaging. Selecting the wrong pack, or not considering all aspects, can cause major issues downstream at the package recovery phase.
This course will provide some insights to explore the decision-making process, to firstly confirm that compostable packaging is the right format for the product and if so, assist in the appropriate selection. You will then gain an understanding of the necessary consumer actions and infrastructure that is essential to ensure compostable packaging can be recovered once discarded, so that it has a positive environmental impact in its various end uses.
Course Objectives:
- Let’s start with ‘why’? Have we firstly taken steps to reduce the packaging, then considered re-use options? Can recycling provide circularity? Certified Compostable packaging needs to be assessed as part of the whole waste hierarchy.
- Gain an understanding of how to define compostable packaging and the importance of the ABA verification program for certifications – AS4736 and AS5810.
- Learn why terms like degradable and biodegradable, without reference to certifications, are meaningless and must be avoided.
- Consider that all components of a compostable package need to be compostable, e.g. inks/coatings.
- Get the background on why oxy-degradable/fragmentable plastics will be phased out.
- Understand the importance of ABA logos on-pack to guide consumer awareness of the correct disposal method.
- Gain awareness of why not all bioplastics, e.g. plastics from renewable resources are compostable.
- Explore what happens to Certified compostable packaging and the processes used in Commercial Composting, whether it arrives via a kerbside Food Organics/Garden Organics (FOGO) bin, or from food service.
- Get a snap shot of some of the certified compostable packaging available today and ways that it may shape the future.
