Plastics: Myths vs Facts | Jolly Plastic

Only rarely is it possible to remove packaging. Just think about the safe transport of mozzarella cheese or specific varieties of fruit like blackberry or raspberry. Packaging plays a key role in protecting products while travelling and to preserve them for longer periods, which is essential to reduce food waste.

If all oil and gas extracted were used to produce plastics, the depletion of resources would not be a problem, as today less than 4% of oil and gas extracted is used to produce plastics.

In the future things will be different : plastics will be more and more produced from renewable sources other than oil and mechanical recycling and the emerging chemical recycling will be more and more common also as a strategic European asset despite the gradual “de-chemicalization” of the Old Continent.

In 2018 the world production capacity of bioplastics reached 2.1 million tonnes, while in Italy it increased by 21% between 2017 and 2018 reaching 88,500 tonnes. According to a Nova-Institut survey on bioplastics, by 2023 the production of bioplastics for packaging will account for less than 10% of the packaging in “traditional” plastic. Anyway, today there are market niches where bioplastics can be used effectively.

That is so wrong! All plastic materials can be recycled. Just think that in 2019 in Italy 70% of packaging waste was recycled: 9.56 million tonnes out of 13.655 million items.

For years Jolly Plastic has been producing recyclable films and we reclaim production waste, which means that our production process is completely circular.

Maybe some people do not like plastic but, due to some of its exclusive physical characteristics like resistance, weldability, resilience, lightness and watertightness, it is irreplaceable in many contexts. Moreover, sometimes replacing plastics with other materials may actually be harmful to the environment.

For example, the BBC has recently demonstrated that cotton and paper bags could actually be worse for the environment than recycled-plastic bags. The energy required to produce a paper bag is more than the energy required for a plastic bag. As for cotton, it is even worse, as it requires much water and intensive farming, which means that the cultivation of cotton has a high environmental impact.

And also considering the reusability of the three solutions, to be equally environmental friendly, for each recycled-plastic bag, a paper bag should be used at least three times while a cotton bag should be used at least 131 times