At EPE, we say blue is the new cool due to the color of our blue insulated coolers, but with the help of a San Diego milk bank and many hospitals in California, we are all singing a new tune of how blue is the now the new green, and in doing so, sets the standard of sustainable packaging for years to come. Going blue to be green might sound funny, but the results are how blue was designed to be used, and by implementing a blue closed loop recovery system, our San Diego milk bank and the many participating California hospitals are helping us save the world one package at a time.
EPS should be banned from the face of the earth like other evils, but for some reason past thinking of costs being more important than our planet are still dominating the transit packaging landscape (think big screen TV’s and the 63 cubic feet of EPS used to package some of them). I keep reading where EPS manufacturers claim EPS recyclable. Yet I can’t find any state, city, our county and states that actually recycle EPS. It ends up in the trash, landfill, and on our planet, and sits there for hundreds of years. Ouch.
Ok, what about single use packaging made from sustainable products like paper. I agree. They are much better than EPS, but the main problem with single use packaging is in the adjective describing the packaging – single use. It provides for one (1) singular direction transit from point A to point B. Then it goes to be recycled. Hopefully. But that still means you have to go cut down a tree, cut up said tree, make the wood into paper, corrugate the paper, then fabricate the paper into packaging materials. That’s a lot of materials, labor, energy, and pollution for just one single transit. Then you have do it all over again to recycle the materials. Now we have more labor, more energy used, and more pollution generated to add to the original package’s energy, labor and pollution. It’s better than EPS, but still impacts our planet significantly, and daily.
So, what did the San Diego milk bank do better? They went blue, and in doing so created the coolest (pun very intended) process to ship breast milk to California hospitals and recover all the packaging for reuse for future shipments. They made blue 100% reusable packaging. This is how you make blue green, and not only green, but like the greenest of them all. And for all the cost first mentality people out there, they did so cost effectively over EPS. Read that sentence again. Cost effective against EPS and best in class sustainability? Told you blue was cool…
Here's the how. The milk bank packages frozen milk in the blue coolers destined for California hospitals. They reached out to each hospital in advance and asked them to join their green initiative by returning the blue coolers to the milk bank with a self-addressed FedEx return label they provide in each carton. The hospitals realized that they no longer would have to deal with and incur the costs of disposing or recycling the current packaging materials, and readily agreed to join the program and ship the blue coolers back to the milk bank. Wait, who pays for the freight back to the milk bank? Aren’t you paying attention? The mill bank does, and they do so gladly as the cost for them to recover the blue cooler is less than having buy a new one. Really? Really. Keep in mind that zone 1 and zone 2 rates for FedEx with lightweight packages are pretty low, and in blue’s case, the freight cost is more than justified for the milk bank to recover and reuse the cooler.
Yes, they wash blue before reusing it. The milk bank uses soap and water. We use steam as not much lives above 212 degrees F. Wash as it you will. Blue can be washed and steamed over and over, and over, and it still looks brand new. Now here is other great part about blue and the whole blue closed loop program. If at any time blue get’s damaged, worn out, or broken, we can simply recycle the PP material back into more blues. So, the process now goes: build blue once, use it over and over for years, then recycle it back into itself. Pretty simple huh? Blue’s closed loop process beats every other packaging option hands down, or hands up for that matter. Hands sideways for all we care. Blue reusability save’s energy, pollution, costs, and most importantly, the planet one package at a time.
Remember why hasn’t the US banned EPS yet? Oh yeah, costs, right? Well, with the help of blue, a milk bank in San Diego and some California hospitals pretty much just proved that argument wrong. Kudos to all parties. And guess what, they are never going to back. Ever. And neither would you, as blue is the future of product transit, and being blue really means being as green as they come.
I guess we can go ahead and ban EPS now?
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