Developing a sustainability plan for your business can be complex. That’s why we’ve developed several tools and recommendations to help you create more environmentally-friendly product packaging and conserve our natural resources. We invite you to explore these sustainable packaging options for reducing your carbon footprint and join us in our efforts to help protect the environment.
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Read About Our Own Sustainability Journey
At Drug Plastics, we believe in making a strong commitment to a sustainable environment. We strive to eliminate unnecessary processes that negatively affect our carbon footprint and reduce our impact on the environment. Read our own case study to learn how we’ve made significant strides towards reducing our overall carbon footprint.
Sustainability Calculators
Our Sustainability Calculators show you how making simple changes to your plastic packaging can be more sustainable and have a have a big impact on the environment. From switching to more sustainable plastic resin and reducing the amount of collateral packaging, to calculating the savings gained from choosing HDPE plastic over glass, these useful tools will provide you with real-world results, and and allow you to select more sustainable packaging.
Bottles Made from Mechanically Recycled Post-Consumer Resin
Our RecyclePak™ brand bottles are made from Post-Consumer Recycled (PCR) HDPE and PCR PET. We offer our most popular bottles in post-consumer plastic that is source controlled, sorted, ground, washed, melt filtered, and pelletized to a purity that meets or exceeds FDA conditions for food-grade use.
Advanced Recycling Offers Virgin Resin from Sustainable Sources
Advanced recycling is a game-changing process that allows post-consumer plastic waste to be recycled into new virgin plastics. Plastic recycled this way can be processed over and over without any reduction in physical properties.
Flame Treatment Elimination
An easy way to conserve fossil fuels like natural gas is to opt out of the flame treatment process. Historically, the use of flaming in the plastic bottle manufacturing process ensured that water-based adhesive labels and silk screening would adhere properly to HDPE, LDPE, and PP bottles. Today, this is not always necessary, depending on the label type you are using.*
*We recommend consulting with your label provider.
For every 5 million bottles not flamed, approximately 3 metric tons of CO2 are eliminated. Use our simple Flaming Elimination tool to calculate the environmental impact of your brand’s decision to avoid flame treatment on its plastic packaging.
Source Reduction - Bottles
Also known as right-weighting, the same bottle can often be manufactured with less plastic to improve sustainability. Right-weighting identifies the required wall thickness specifically for your product.
A bottle with too little plastic may be too thin to hold up to filling lines or may deform after product is filled.
A bottle with unnecessary excess plastic may result in wasted plastic and added costs.
Source Reduction - Closures
Choosing a child resistant closure that is a single wall, one-part closure – such as our Snap Cap or Pop & Click™ closure – instead of a double wall, two-part closure – like our SecuRx closure can help conserve natural resources, and still maintain FDA-approval and child resistant safety standards.
Use our Polypropylene Closure Calculator to learn how much your can save by switching.
Reusable Plastic Pallets
Convert to reusable plastic pallets: they will last longer than wood pallets, eliminate pallet moisture and improve safety in handling.
Using durable plastic pallets instead of wood pallets reduces the use of raw materials in the pallet manufacturing process (natural gas, metal, forests, etc.), aiding in efforts towards Zero Net Deforestation.
Returnable plastic pallets also provide savings over the long term.
Biodegradable Trends
Legislative trend – California is enacting legislation to control the claims and use of biodegradable plastic.
Corporate trend – Major companies, like Walmart, are not approving the use of biodegradable additives for plastics made from petroleum.
Petrochemical industry trend – This industry is supporting recycling of plastics, not biodegradability.
Drug Plastics fully supports recycling of plastics and continues to evaluate the market and potential use of biodegradable options.