Ecover To Pioneer The Use Of Sugar Cane Based Materials to Create More Sustainable Packaging!

Ecover To Pioneer The Use Of Sugar Cane Based Materials To Create More Sustainable Packaging!

Aug 24, 2010 | By Deb

Sugarcane Image via wikipedia/commons

In the area of sustainability and environmental ethics, Ecover has long been an industry leader. Now Ecover continues to pioneer as it becomes one of a very few companies to use a sugar cane based form of polyethylene (PE) in its packaging. Starting next year Ecover will use this new form of high‐density polyethylene as packaging for its liquid products—and this new PE is based on completely renewable raw materials!

The material comes from Brazilian plastics manufacturer Braskem, the first company in the world to produce certified “green” polyethylene. Using sugar cane as a bio resource helps Ecover to minimize its ecological impact even further, as PE based on sugar cane is believed to emit at least 75 percent less greenhouse gases during its life span than traditionally produced PE.

Ecover will be the first brand of cleaning products to use this material on a large scale. (As of January 2011 all Ecover bottles will contain a minimum of 30 percent sugar cane based PE.)

“We are investing more and more in product and process developments, where we assess every aspect of our business to see where we can implement a positive change,” says Tom Domen, Marketing Manager at Ecover. “Our packaging is an obvious part of this. The venture with Braskem will have a considerable positive impact on our CO2 emissions. We look forward to launching the new packaging on the market next year.”

What can we say but “sweet!”

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6 Responses to “Ecover To Pioneer The Use Of Sugar Cane Based Materials To Create More Sustainable Packaging!”

katie 10/09/06 16:12

Wow, pretty interesting post. Cane sugar is great!
Green Goddesss 10/09/09 22:10

This is very exciting news! The less petroleum used to make packaging the better. I love that Ecover is leading the way with sustainable packaging, and I hope more companies will follow your lead.
Christina Anne 10/09/14 02:08

Good for you guys!!! That is so cool what you r doing with cane sugar and making a difference in this world.
jimmy 10/10/08 12:51

Unfortunatelly they are doing now what they always try to avoid: greenwashing.
They shouldn’t be using virgin material, even if it’s renewable. They can use 100 recovered HDPE for detergents. That would avoid production of new material and save place in landfills. Virgin material should only be used for food or other high spec applications.
Recycling is a demand driven market. If no one uses the recovered material, they will not collect and reuse it. Ecover should be leading this.
Suger cane based ethanol also has the same problems as biofuels: they are in direct competition with food production.
Last point of disappointment: Now they are buying virgin material from Brasil since that’s the only supplier of this material. This also increases transport as recovered HDPE (and regular HDPE) is readily available near their production facilities.
vluther 10/10/15 09:49

First of all, we do agree that the future way to go for packaging is to use recycled material as much as possible. That’s also the reason why we choose an easy recyclable material that does not interfere with the existing recycling streams. We do not agree with the fact that using this new PE from sugarcane instead of PE from oil is greenwashing though. To our opinion, recycling is not the only thing one needs to do regarding packaging. The perfect solution does not yet exist.

Some background as to why we made this choice and how we see this evolving in the future:

- As a company, using renewable ingredients is at the heart of what we do. Using petrochemicals, be it for packaging, detergents or any other products, is not sustainable in the long term. Just look at the resent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or to the political instability oil is causing worldwide. It might be so that some of these problems will be less problematic when oil would be used in a more clever way (always recycle material made from oil and never use it as a fuel), but it is a bit like this with recycled material, if you do not create a demand for an alternative for oil, we will keep on using it. And apart from the CO2 problems related to that, one day it will be finished with the oil… As you have a quality loss when recycling PE and making it into new bottles, there will always be the need for new virgin material. By just stimulating the recycling streams of petrochemical based plastics, the demand for virgin petrochemical based plastics will remain.

- When making the decision for the PE out of sugarcane, a detailed life cycle analysis was made by the University of Wageningen in Holland, who specializes in footprint analysis. We took over a year to investigate each step in the chain in great detail and to compare the impact of this material compared to virgin material from oil and recycled material. When doing all things according to best practice, from planting, harvesting and processing, the CO2 footprint of this material came out as the best alternative. Braskem was very open to discuss each step of the chain and also they are committed to doing everything as it should be. This will soon translate itself in a supply chain that is completely certified by an independent organization, making sure that every step is done according to best practice.

- From all crops, sugarcane is the one with the highest energy content to make ethanol from. Sugar as a food additive itself is not a food necessity crop (even causing more negative health effects than positive ones). The area where sugarcane is grown also does not conflict directly with other food crops or with protected natural areas like the rain forest. The Brazilian movement towards ethanol from sugarcane in fact never influenced foodcrop prices on the world market. But it is not an easy debate if the Brazilian wave towards ethanol from sugarcane was a good or a bad thing. I’m not in favor of using ethanol for combusting engines either. It’s a waste of resources and it just keeps a non efficient technology as the combustion engine going. This is definitely the case for ethanol from wheat for example. That is a complete waste and does compete directly with the food chain. Using ethanol to make a re-usable, recyclable packaging, to me does make sense (an interesting report on this from WWF can be found on http://www.biofuelsandclimate.files.wordpress.com/2009/…/wwf-biotech.pdf ) as this creates a lot less pressure to constantly keep up with the demand for virgin material. But then as you say, we also need to drive using recycled material.

- So why aren’t we using recycled material than? Let’s be clear that our aim is to use a bottle that comes partly from renewable material and partly from recycled material. The only available recycled PE that is out there at the moment is recycled plastic from milk bottles. It is sad, but milk bottles are the only recycling stream at the moment that delivers a good quality grade. This grade for milk bottles is, however, not compatible with detergents. So a 100% recycled bottle from that grade for our products is not possible, unless you seriously over-dimension your bottle (making it very heavy and using more material than actually needed). Another option is to make multi layered bottles with a virgin PE grade for detergents (preferably from a renewable source…) and a second layer of recycled milk bottle grade. This is something I agree we should look at if in the near future no better waste streams are being set up. We are, however, in close contact with the recycling facilities near our production plant and it looks like more intelligent waste streams are finally on the verge of being mature. This would mean we could use a recycled detergent grade for detergents and use the milk grade for milk bottles. That would be a lot more material efficient in the long term. But definitely, we do have the responsibility to drive the market for recycled material, as you are rightly saying. In Europe, we have been for years a pioneer looking for all kinds of refill solutions, offering consumers the possibility to re-use the bottle, which is even better than recycling.

- A last note on the transport from Brazil. In the life cycle analysis, it came out clearly that the transport from Brazil to Europe of the raw material by boat has a relatively small impact compared to the other steps in the chain. Both the plant in Brazil as well as our production plant are not located far from the harbor. The impact of transporting the raw material from the South of France to Belgium by road would have a higher impact than by boat from Sao Paolo to the Antwerp harbor.

So as a conclusion we would just like to point out that this is not a matter of black and white, where only recycled material is the way to go. In our opinion, it should be more part of the solution. So let’s make bottles that use as little material as possible, that people can re-use several times, and make those from a renewable source as we always have done before the oil expansion. Let’s then make sure the bottle is recycled and turned into another bottle of preferably a similar usage, to minimize the quality loss when recycling. It is clear that we are not there yet and it is only fair to receive some criticism on the fact that we are not there yet. We hope that we were able to paint a more nuanced picture of the pro’s and con’s of using a renewable material for packaging reasons.

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