Kickstart: A cup of coffee with room for sustainability

Coffee pods once deemed as an example of plastic waste — although that idea is undergoing some revision — could soon be available in a bio-based, certified home compostable plastic.

PHA manufacturer Danimer Scientific Inc. and PLA producer TotalEnergies Corbion said in a news release they have developed a material currently being tested by "numerous" European countries.

The pods would also fall into line with a recent European Union proposal that would require pods, tea bags and labels for fruit to be fully compostable.

A Michigan-based retailer will contribute another $550,000 toward a beach cleanup program after a successful pilot project in 2022.

Meijer Inc. says the money — in addition to a previous $1 million donation — will enable the Council of the Great Lakes Region to place the BeBot beach cleaning robot and Pixie Drone water-based remote-control cleaning system at 18 new locations in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.

A test program in Muskegon, Mich., last year collected 6,130 waste items.

"What's amazing about these devices is that they do pick up plastic that's probably four to six inches under the surface of the sand, which people typically wouldn't pick up on their own," Erik Petrovskis, director of environmental compliance and sustainability at Meijer, told our sister paper Crain's Grand Rapids Business.

Students and staff from the Annis Water Resources Institute at Grand Valley State University run the remote-control robots that can harvest plastic waste such as cigarette butts, plastic bottles and fibers, food wrappers and foam.

Packaging giant Berry Global Group Inc. will open an innovation center in Barcelona with plans to promote and develop its "Bmore Circular Solutions" products that use recycled content, offer refill or reuse solutions to minimize waste or incorporate designs that improve recyclability, our sister paper Sustainable Plastics writes.

As PN's Jim Johnson noted last month, Evansville, Ind.-based Berry has been boosting the sustainability of its packaging. In 2022, 3.4 percent of its resins were post-consumer material, up from 2.6 percent in 2021. Including all recycled plastics and bioplastics, circular resins purchased were 4.9 percent of the total, up from 3.9 percent in 2021, the company said.