When you buy an RTE meal today, most often it’s not in an aluminum tray. If you’re conscientious about recycling, you probably think, "here’s another unrecyclable piece of plastic"— because once you heat it in the microwave, you can’t clean the tray well enough to recycle it. What’s the solution? Well, there’s the old standby—aluminum.

Anellotech, a sustainable technology company, has achieved new milestones in its pursuit of a 100-percent bio-based bottle.

While the primary packaging of food and beverage products looks fantastic, once these packages enter a cardboard shipping container, they seem to lose their identity, their pizzazz—all the effort that went into the package and label design is lost in the plain old shipping carton. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Styrotek, a manufacturer of expanded polystyrene foam packaging for grapes, recently undertook a major water efficiency program. In eight weeks, the company reduced its water usage from 20 million gallons per year to 12 million.

Michael Kuebler shares his insights into Amazon’s impact on packaging, creating sustainable packaging that also works well, and the most important things to consider when developing new packaging.

By blending the materials, researchers hope to improve the barrier properties of a plastic film—leveraging the water resistance of polyethylene with the good oxygen barrier properties of starch.