Walgreens Makes A Simple Change To Boost Sustainability Efforts
In its effort to make product packaging more sustainable Walgreens is progressing toward its goals and found a solution in an unexpected place — nail polish remover bottle caps.
In a post on its website, Walgreens said it decided to move away from black plastic commonly found in caps and packaging used in beauty and personal care products and convert to white caps.
“By switching from black plastic caps to white plastic caps in just §seven Walgreens brand products, we’re able to improve the recyclability of a projected 13 tons of plastic,” says Andrew Horn, Walgreens’ senior manager of sustainability operations. “Many recycling facilities use mechanical vision systems, essentially robots with cameras for eyes, to sort packaging that comes in. They have a difficult time correctly identifying black plastic. So, too often, they’ll put it in the waste stream or just inaccurately sort it into the wrong recycling stream.”
With a focus on enhancing the packaging of its Walgreens brand nail polish remover packaging, the drug store chain’s manager of packaging sciences, Dionne Carloni, worked with product managers and product suppliers to identify recyclable plastic options and began using those options across the retailer’s beauty and personal care product line.
"We strive to eliminate carbon black plastic from Walgreens brand packaging whenever possible, even if that means deviating from comparable national brand packaging," said Carloni. “It’s a risk because we rely on colors to help our customers navigate to our products, but it's a change we’ve committed to in order to improve the recyclability of our packaging.”
Walgreens has also worked to eliminate the use of PVC plastic from blister packaging that is typically used with items such as toothbrushes.
“Recycling centers have an extremely difficult time recycling PVC, and most municipal facilities here in the U.S. don't handle it at all,” said Horn. “If we want to be 100% recyclable, we can't use PVC. We take a proactive approach with suppliers when discussing materials, and if they are proposing PVC, we tell them not to. PVC can often be replaced with a PET plastic that’s much more recyclable and is indistinguishable to customers.”
The efforts to revamp packaging is part of Walgreens series of four goals for its own brand products. By 2030 the retailer wants to reduce plastic packaging by 30%, make all packaging recyclable, increase recycled content in packaging and eliminate problematic single-use packaging.
