Sustainability Initiative: Association of Plastic Recyclers Membership

Inovar Packaging Group is a leader when it comes to providing our customers with sustainable choices for labels and packaging. We understand that making the shift to sustainable or recyclable packaging can be difficult and costly, and finding the right solution that works for your brand, budget, and ESG targets isn’t always straightforward. Our membership in the Association of Plastic Recyclers is one of the many ways we’ve positioned ourselves to be at the top of the industry when it comes to creating sustainable labels and packaging for our customers.

What is the Association of Plastic Recyclers?

The Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR) is an international non-profit focused exclusively on improving recycling for plastics. Their tools and resources help companies like Inovar Packaging Group design packaging that can be recycled, support innovations that overcome existing recycling challenges, and encourage reliable markets for post-consumer recycled content. The end goal of all their work is to enable plastic recyclers to successfully turn plastic waste into a new resource.

They have four recyclability categories into which packaging can be segmented: APR Design® Guide Preferred, Detrimental to Recycling, Renders Packaging Non-Recyclable, and Requires Testing.

How does our Membership in APR help our customers?

While it can be easy to determine if primary packaging material is recyclable with some basic information about what type of material it is, once you label a product, you immediately add another variable that impacts your packaging’s recyclability. Regardless of whether your use a pressure sensitive label, shrink sleeve, roll fed label, or even print directly on the packaging, you’ve now added an element that can affect the recycling stream.

Our team of experts, guided by resources available to us through our membership in APR, can remove the complication and legwork from making a product that is fully recyclable. When you provide us with your primary packaging material information, we will guide you to the proper material combination for your label or shrink sleeve to ensure your product can be successfully recycled.

Ultimately, our expertise and knowledge in the field of recycling leads to savings for you: huge time savings as we’ve done the hard work of sourcing and identifying material combinations that are APR Design® Guide Preferred, and corresponding economical savings from the trial and error and testing you’d otherwise have to do to find the proper materials to fulfill both your design and ESG goals.

For brands in many industries, providing customers with products in more sustainable packaging, or at least having a plan for doing so, is non-negotiable. Fully recyclable packaging is one of the best ways to be more sustainable without overhauling your entire production and packaging system. But trying to create recyclable packaging without a partner who knows the ropes can be tricky; let our team, taught from the experts at APR, guide you to the recycling packaging solution that’s appropriate for your brand. Contact us today and we can start engineering a packaging solution that will help your company lead the way to a brighter tomorrow.