“We’ve rolled out six products like this over the past few months,” he said. “We have supplied them to the pet food market, the liquid market for washing products and also to the snack products.”
The award-winning pouch was created by OF Packaging, which joined the Close the Loop group when it listed in late December. A packaging product she created for reusable and refillable household cleaning products company Zero Co also won a gold medal at the awards show, hosted by US chemicals giant Dow.
Close the Loop Group started in the early 2000s as a recycler of printer cartridges and toners and expanded into product design and manufacturing, through OF Packaging. While its origins were in recycling printer cartridges, it sees its future growth coming from breaking down and reusing items such as batteries, electronic waste, power tools and cosmetics.
The company operates approximately 200,000 collection centers in the United States (where people can drop off their goods for recycling or reuse) and 60,000 in Australia, where individuals and businesses can drop off printer and toner cartridges. other urban waste.
When it listed in December, Close the Loop had an issue price of 20¢. On Friday, it closed at 30¢ per share.
Mr. Foster said he wanted to help the industry meet the 2025 national packaging targets of 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging, 70% recycled or composted plastic packaging, 50% average recycled content included in packaging and the scaling of problematic and unnecessary single-use plastics.
These targets have been set by the Australian Packaging Covenant Organization and are supported by Federal, State and Territory governments.
“We’re not waiting for industry to come to us, we’re saying we’ll give you the solutions you need,” Foster said. “I campaigned for us to work together to bring these solutions to market…because the whole world has woken up to sustainability.
“2025 is fast approaching and these goals are ambitious, but I believe they are achievable.”
In Tuesday’s federal budget, $60 million was earmarked for advanced flexible plastics recycling technology, which was part of the government’s $250 million recycling fund.
While Close The Loop creates flexible plastic solutions that can be integrated into existing recycling infrastructure, others are working on new recycling methods.
Last month, Samsara Eco raised $6 million to help it commercialize a new, patented carbon-neutral recycling process, using enzymes that can break down plastics into their basic building blocks, called monomers.
Mr Foster backed “off the shelf” ideas like using enzymes, saying the industry is “at the tip of the iceberg” of what is possible.