SPE names recipients of GPEC 2010 Environmental Stewardship Awards

Linda Casey -- Packaging Digest, 2/9/2010 7:06:53 PM

The Plastics Environmental Division of the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) have announced the recipients of the Global Plastics Environmental Conference (GPEC) 2010 Environmental Stewardship Awards.

Recipients of these ten awards reflect the conference theme "Sustainability & Recycling: Raising the Bar in Today's Economy" by meeting or exceeding the following nine criteria: must contribute to environmental improvement; must involve plastics; must have been commercially adopted or accepted in 2009; must promote leadership in environmental areas; contribution should be verifiable; should facilitate innovation, standards and regulations;must demonstrate leadership in a specific area, e.g., technology, marketing, legislation, education and community; must demonstrate creativity and originality; and must have significant impact, showing value for its intended purpose.

Nicos Polymers Group: Chairman's Award
The company's proprietary process for the removal of continuous fiber reinforcement from flexible composites, enables the cleanest possible recovery of a polymer substrate.

Delta Plastics of the South: Daniel Eberhardt Environmental Stewardship Award
Having achieved its extraordinary goal of reclaiming and recycling virtually 100 percent of its used manufactured LLDPE irrigation tubing, Delta Plastics is now recycling a large portion of competitors' tubing and an additional 1,436,000 lb/month of miscellaneous LDPE products into certified post-consumer resin.

Arkema Inc.: Plastic Materials from Renewable Sources
Pebax RNew is the first engineering thermoplastic elastomer (TPE) range made from renewable resources.

BIOtech Products LLC: New Environmental Technologies in Conventional Plastic Materials
BIOchem^TM organometallic additives render conventional plastics landfill biodegradable (in accordance with ASTM D 5526 for anaerobic biodegradation in landfills), while retaining or improving normal service life and processing as typically expected of organotitanates.

Eco Research Institute Ltd.: Emerging Technologies in Materials, Processing & Applications
New technologies for pulverizing paper into powders as minute as 50 μm and compounding the paper with plastics yield pelletized eco-friendly plastics for mass-production molding.

VastEnterprises LLC: Design for Sustainability
Composite pavers produced from a proprietary blend of up to 95 percent recycled car tires and plastic containers meet the demanding requirements for esthetics, durability, sustainability and installation efficiency.

Amway: Design for Sustainability
The eSpring System is a water purifier that incorporates a sustainable design based on life-cycle assessment without sacrificing the features and benefits that many consumers desire.

Associated Packaging Technologies: Plastics Recycling Technologies and Applications
A range of thermoformed crystalline PET (CPET) trays is designed with smaller environmental impacts than traditional CPET products.

Mannington Mills Inc: Carpet/Floor/Wall Coverings Recycling
Mannington has expanded LOOP, their program for recycling post-consumer carpet into carpet and resilient, to now include recycling vinyl composition tile (VCT).

Mack Molding Co. and BigBelly Solar: Enabling Technologies in Processes and Procedures
The BigBelly Solar Compactor is a solar-powered compacting trash receptacle for large scale, low-cost municipal waste collection; Mack Molding Co. injection-molds the solar bubble, fabricates the back panel and door, procures more than 150 unique parts, and totally assembles the compactor and optional recycler for direct shipment to BigBelly Solar's customers internationally.