This April 22 will mark the 51st Earth Day, a time to share our love of the planet, reflect, and innovate.
This year’s official Earth Day theme is Restore Our Earth™ and centers on “natural processes, emerging green technologies, and innovative thinking that can restore the world’s ecosystems.”
For our take, we’ve adopted the tagline “Reduce waste. Reuse plastic film. Restore our Earth.” The idea is simple: recycling plastic films reduces waste and allows those films to be reused in new products. This cycle keeps plastics out of the environment and in necessary products that benefit us all.
You may also notice that we have a new Earth Day 2021 logo. This logo has a special surprise hidden inside — the red, green, and blue plastic films that make up the logomark are scrap from our Morristown plant that is set to be recycled again! With the logo and tagline, our goal, as always, is to relay how valuable and sustainable plastics can be. To further prove this, we will be posting about our green technologies and sustainability projects. Most importantly, we will be launching a new sustainable product on Earth Day.
Before we get there, though, we would like to share a bit of our sustainability story. Our history with Earth Day goes back further than you may expect. Petoskey Plastics started operating the same month that Earth Day was first held back in April of 1970. While we initially focused on in-house recycling in 1978, we now recycle over 30 million lbs. of plastic film per year by diverting landfill-bound plastic waste.
Petoskey Plastics has worked hard to provide sustainable products through our closed-loop partnerships. We pioneered the program in 1992 and have been going strong since. In addition, we have an industry-first Sustainability Scorecard program for customers that purchase our products with materials made from Post-Consumer Recycled (PCR) resin. The scorecards show customers how their purchases impacted carbon footprint equivalents, emission offsets, and water savings.
Most recently, we’ve committed to operating our new facility in Texas completely through wind energy. It was important to us to better serve our customers outside of the Midwest while upholding our sustainable vision. We are very excited about this decision and look forward to finding more ways to promote green strategies internally.
In the end, we enjoy Earth Day, but we know that just one week isn’t enough. That is why Petoskey Plastics continues to focus on sustainability every day. From new product development to internal practices, we take the future of our planet seriously. So don’t worry — we will still be posting about sustainability long after Earth Day is over.
The best way to stay tuned as we post more about our sustainable initiatives, accomplishments, and products is to follow our social media accounts. That’s where you will see our big announcement on Earth Day!
You can find more of our sustainability information on the Petoskey Plastics and Greencore® websites. Visit Earth Day Network or National Geographic for virtual educational and celebrational events all week long.
Happy Earth Week, everyone!