September heralds National Recycling Week and the Great British Beach Clean, both bringing into focus our unsustainable reliance on single use plastic. It is estimated that 1.2 million metres of one such ubiquitous product, cling film is used annually in households in Britain alone and that doesn’t take into consideration the millions or metres used in the hospitality and retail industries. With most traditional cling film ending up in landfill, Gruppo Fabbri’s new Nature Fresh, the world’s first bioplastic compostable cling film, offers a much-needed solution to this mounting plastic problem.
Gruppo Fabbri’s Nature Fresh has all the food-preserving benefits of standard cling film but instead of lingering in landfill or sneaking into our oceans to haunt us for thousands of years, it is compostable in six to twelve months. Michele Govoni, UK branch managing director of Gruppo Fabbri explains: “Plastic film, including cling film, makes up roughly half of all the plastic packaging used in the UK each year. However, most local authorities don’t accept plastic film in their kerbside recycling collections, so the majority of this ends up in landfill. Nature Fresh is a bio-plastic which is biodegradable and compostable. You can put in your home compost or recycle it with your compost collection and within twelve months it will convert into CO2, water and biomass, ready to spread on your vegetable patch.”
One of the first producers to adopt Nature Fresh in the UK is Westaways sausages, based in Kingsteignton. Their forward-thinking MD Charles Baughn explains: “We are very conscious of our environmental impact and we wanted to get our packaging just right. We were thrilled to discover Nature Fresh. When you buy a pack of Westaways sausages you can simply put the cardboard tray into the recycling bin and either place the bioplastic film into your own garden compost heap or put into the organic waste bin for organic recycling. Either way it will break down into harmless materials and no plastic will be going into the environment. We hope that many more producers and retailers will adopt this fantastic new product and help significantly reduce the amount of single use plastic that burdens our fragile planet.”
Nature Fresh is suitable for direct food contact with all types of foods including fatty ones. It offers effective protection against microbial contamination and high moisture vapour transmission rates. It can also be printed with compostable inks. It is available from Automac UK Ltd in rolls for automatic packaging or hand-wrap, cutter-boxes and jumbo rolls and can be composted at home or through industrial organic waste recycling.
For more information visit www.gruppofabbri.com
