As a trade bindery in the Printing Industry we package a number of our finished products in shrink film. Shrink film can take hundreds of years to biodegrade.

In our ongoing search for environmentally friendly products, we have found a new biodegradable shrink film.  It is a polyolefin heat shrink film that degrades over a 3 to 5 year period (as compared to a regular shrink film product that can take hundreds of years in the landfill to decompose).

Sourcing this product in North America was a significant challenge.  We had to go global!  The product is used in the U.K. and that’s where we first found it; but it is manufactured in France. We tracked it to the U.S. and found a sales office in Eastern U.S. who was handling it.  We’re from the West Coast of Canada so we needed to locate a distributor closer to us.  We found one in Edmonton, Alberta.

After running some trials (and making some equipment changes), we are extremely pleased with how well the product runs and performs.  It has good sealing and shrinkage properties at low temperatures and can run on both manual and automatic equipment.

The film degrades at the end of its useful life: it fragments and oxidizes through the long term effect of light and heat. It then becomes assimilated by the soil and eventually disappears in the landfill, leaving only water, carbon dioxide and biomass.

Do the right thing: use environmentally friendly packaging materials!

Plastic Coils is, unfortunately, one of the things we can’t recycle today. Plastic coiling is preferred over other binding options such as perfect binding because of its ability to lay flat without much effort and the ability to flip a book 360 degrees without damaging the spine.

A company in the U.S., MyBinding.com, is now carrying a new Eco-line recycled plastic coils. The coils are 100% recycled from scrap coils and are remanufactured in different pitches and sizes. The coils are still made from PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride) and only comes in black. Speaking with Jeff McRitchie from mybinding.com, Jeff told me that the coils are made at a plant by collecting odds and loose ends of coils currently, melted, refabricated and sold to dealers for commercial use.

Historically, it was difficult to recycle coils. But a company in Brussels, Solvay SA’s R&D Center, has come up with a process called Vinyloop ® to recycle or upcycle coils. The process is done in 6 steps:

1. Composite waste is collected and brought to their plant in either Ferrara, Italy or Chiba, Japan. The material goes through cleaning (washing), increasing of surface area by cutting, grinding, and milling, and a homogenization step.
2. In a dissolution chamber, a solvent called methyl ethyl ketone dissolves the PVC and its additives. Anything that cannot be dissolved will be removed later.
3. The separation of the insoluble materials are filtered in the next tank.
4. In order to yield pure PVC material, the composite product is stripped of the solvent in a precipitation stage. Precipitation of the dissolved PVC at this stage allows the manufacturer to integrate more additives for other characteristics such as flexibility and strength.
5. The solvent that is evaporated condenses in its original chamber and is ready for another batch of material. This allows the solvent to be re-used 99.9% of the time.
6. The drying stage comes last. The aqueous solution of PVC is dried and the water is filtered to remove impurities. The new PVC is called R-PVC (remanufactured PVC) formed in pellets for ease of use. In the case of plastic coil binding, the pellets are melted and formed into coils.

Unfortunately, these coils are only available from MyBinding.com right now. You can contact Jeff McRitchie at jeff@mybinding.com with any questions or order information.

Have any printers or binderies had a look at the SGP website (http://www.sgppartnership.org)? The SGP has a certification program for sustainable print industry companies: incorporating green business practices, environmental initiatives, corporate social responsibility and the economics of making it work.