Sustainability and Stand Up Pouches

Everywhere I turn I hear about "sustainability".  Cities are having award ceremonies for the most sustainable company and corporations are implementing their sustainability policy with much fanfare and back slapping.  Local communities are competing with others to see who is more sustainable.  Yikes, I just gloss over!  What does this have to do with stand up pouches?  I'll get there in a second.

The best definition I've seen for sustainability is "sustainability implies that an action can be continued indefinitely with little or manageable impact on the environment."  Which leads to my bit about stand up pouches.  Also known as stand bags or stand up bags, these flexible pouches are made from multiple layers of barrier film laminated together.  Stand up bags are landfill friendly, meaning they can be thrown away with any other type of trash, and they can certainly be recycled with other plastics, ground back up and used to make more plastic items.  This means that using stand up bags, custom or printed, stock and plain, have little or manageable impact on the environment and thus are an example of sustainable packaging.

There seems to be a growing attitude that only paper products are sustainable, or I should say packaging packaging, and that's just nonsense.  Here's where we've all been led astray.  Without a closed loop system to grab and reuse or grab and grind up paper or plastic for that matter, it ALL goes to the landfill.  Garbage that goes to the landfill smells, it outright stinks.  Stand up pouches, empty milk bottles, bubble wrap, banana peels, etc...they all smell.  What is the first thing they do with trash in a landfill?  They bury it.  What makes it to the landfill gets buried WAY below the earth, the faster the better.  The problem is, once it is buried, oxygen and sunlight cannot get there to decompose it.  There have been studies that have drilled down 300+ feet into a landfill only to bring up a newspaper from 20 years ago that can be read just like it was yesterday.  That's pretty sad.

Let me be clear, companies, cities and people who have the time and resources to gather trash, garbage, cartons, and yes stand up pouches and take the necessary steps to separate and reuse/repurpose these items without negatively affecting the environment, I applaud you and thank you.  Unfortunately, the truth is this doesn't happen as often as you'd think.