CS Robertson Packaging Gets A New Look

Times change and so do we. CS Robertson Packaging is getting a new look website with lots of new features that have been requested from our existing customers.

Not only has the site been given a well deserved face lift but also lots of new functionality has been added to make your shopping experience much easier.

The new design will be going live over the next 24 hours as the internet updates our address across the web.

Some of the new features include a wish list so you can store products in your cart before you decide to purchase anything and lots of integration with our social media applications.

Have you checked out our Facebook and Twitter pages yet?

Let us know what you think of the new site once it goes live where you are and why not give us a like on Facebook and a follow on Twitter (we always follow back)

Why not check out the new site now - Food Packaging by CS Robertson Packaging

Passive RFID Tags For Food Packaging?

Not the first place you would expect the latest news from the bar coding industry but Dutch researchers have developed a smart radio frequency identification (RFID) chip that is small enough to be placed on flexible food packaging.

If this technology progresses we will soon see the end of best before dates and the product actually telling you how fresh it is. This technology could be used to allow 4th generation mobile phones the ability to speak directly to the product and be told all the information about its freshness and where it has come from.

Could this be the end of the traditional barcode?

This passive RFID tag technology could be inexpensively mass-produced and and we could be seeing it replace the humble barcode.

Several organisations are involved in the thin-film RFID tag development programme including the Holst Centre, Evonik and Polyic.

Passive RFID Tags

In the past, RFID tags have been made from silicon which was never going to be developed further for the food packaging market due to the extremely high cost to produce them.

As a Imec representative explained

The ‘reader-talks-first-communication' element is this technology's real breakthrough. Previously, RFID tags operated on the principle of the tag talking first - transmitting data following the application of an RFID reader's radio frequency field. This process can sometimes generate conflict, with multiple tags all trying to stream data to one particular reader simultaneously and while, in response, anti-collision systems have been developed to try and counter this issue, there are limitations to their use.

"When the RFID reader first powers and contacts the tag, it transmits a clock and identification data", Imec's Paul Heremans stated in a company press release. "The tag then uses this data and clock to determine when to send its code. This mechanism for the first time allows implementing a practical anti-collision scheme for thin-film RFID tags."

Consumer Packaging Tags
Passive RFID tags are already widely used by various industries including large courier companies and manufacturers to track their products through the production life cycle.

an Imec representative explained

"Item-level tagging could allow vendors to implement automatic billing and inventory management", he said. "On top of these applications, such RFID tags could be integrated with sensors for smart RFID tags. In this way, they could be integrated into food packaging to provide customers with information on freshness or characteristics of this product."

Imagine no longer having to count stock individually but knowing exactly how many products you have on the shelf or if any are out of date with just the wave of a wand (or mobile phone).

RECYCLING: PLASTICS

Recycling is processing used material (waste) into new products to prevent waste of potentially useful materials this then reduces the need for virgin raw materials, reduces energy usage, reduces air pollution (from incineration) , reduces water pollution (from land filling) by reducing the need for conventional waste disposal and lower greenhouse gas emissions – compared to virgin production.

Recycling is a key component of modern waste reduction the other components are Reduce and Reuse. Recycling generally means reproducing the same type of products where as reuse means breaking something down into parts and producing a different material or product.

Plastic recycling is the process of recovering scrap or waste plastic and reprocessing the material into other plastic products. Recycling process before recycling most plastics are sorted according to their resin type. The plastic recyclables ate them shredded. These shredded fragments then undergo cleaning processes to eliminate impurities. The material is then melted and either extruded in sheet, flake or pellet form.

Post consumer polyethylene terephthalate (PET) containers are sorted into colours and baled for onward sale. PET recyclers further sort the baled bottles and they are washed and flaked. The clean flake is dried. Further treatment can take place e.g. filtering and palletising or various treatments to produce food contact approved recycled PET (rPET). A common use for rPET is containers - food or non food contact produced by injection moulding or thermoforming sheet rPET to produce a range of plastic trays or hinge packs.

The bulk of plastic cutlery, available now in the UK, comes from overseas – mainly the Far East. The environmental impact / carbon footprint of importing these products is considerable. In response to current trends for environmental products i.e. products which inflict minimal / no harm to the environment  it is now possible to get quality plastic cutlery in the UK, manufactured in the UK using rPET and recycled HIPS.
Packaging manufacturers have a responsibility to regularly review their products and processes - minimising waste and maximising production output. By recycling post manufacture thermoform plastic waste it has been possible to create a premium quality / strong cutlery range made from post production waste.

The use of Biodegradable plastics is increasing but it can cause problems as the reclaimed biodegradable plastic is not recyclable because of the variance in properties and melt temperatures. Biodegradable and compostable packaging currently requires a lot of energy to produce and recovery can be expensive and have little worth, whereas recycled materials can be recovered and reused again and again.    

In an article written by Stephen Pollard entitled “The evils of the plastic bag have been much exaggerated” which appeared in the Express Newspaper on Saturday July 30th 2011. Stephen Pollard puts across a rare, but very poignant article in defence of the humble carrier bag.

There's a famine in Somalia. economic growth is paltry. Crime is rampant. But what’s the issue that seems to drive some people to real anger? Plastic bags. 

That’s right. The fact that we are now using more plastic bags than we have done for the past few years has given rise to all kinds of ever more apocalyptic claims about the destruction they are causing. And they are, if you’ll excuse the pun, rubbish.  

Here are the facts. Green campaigners have been targeting the use of plastic bags for years. They have never produced a shred of convincing evidence to back up their claims about the supposed harm bags cause. 

But in 2006 a government body, the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap), produced its first proper statistics on the use of plastic bags. The total – 11 billion – seemed to shock people. The government, supermarkets and environmental activists began a campaign to cut down on that 11 billion figure. Within three years, by 2009, there had been a 40 per cent reduction to 6.5 billion a year.  

Plastic bags became distinctly uncool and “bags for life” the height of chic. In 2007, for example, Sainsbury’s launched its cotton shopping bag designed by Anya hindmarch, with the slogan “I’m not a plastic bag” splashed across it. It cost £5 in the supermarket but started selling on eBay for up to £200. 

Yesterday Wrap produced its figures for 2010 and the use of plastic bags is on the increase again. Last year we used 6.8 bil-lion plastic bags, a five per cent rise on the 2009 figure.
Judging from the reaction to this news you’d think every user of a plastic bag had been guilty of dumping nuclear waste in the street. 

The recycling minister Lord Henley threatened to introduce legislation. In some parts of the UK that has already happened. From October, all shoppers in Wales must pay at least 5p for a plastic bag. Northern Ireland is now consulting on a similar charge. And although the Scottish administration has backed off there is a lot of pressure from campaigners for the idea to be revived. Yes, plastic bags cause litter which can be distinctly unsightly.  

There are few more annoying eyesores than carrier bags caught up in tree branches. It makes sense to use the “bags for life” that supermarkets go out of their way to sell us.
But the truth is that the supposed environmental threat from plastic bags is one of the great myths of our time, consistently shown to be nonsense by all serious studies and based on a distortion of the evidence. The only serious argument against plastic bags is that they are so unsightly. The claim repeated ad nauseam is that they take 1,000 years to decompose and so cause far more problems than ordinary litter. 

But this needs to be put in perspective. Of all the waste that goes to landfill only 20 per cent is from households. And of that, just 0.03 per cent is plastic bags. Their use could be cut to zero and it would have almost no impact on landfill. The most outlandish claim, however, is the most widely repeated – that millions of creatures are killed in the sea by plastic bags, either because they swallow them or because they get tangled up. 

The WWF said in 2005 that 200 species, including whales, seals and dolphins, were affected. Indeed, the United Nations Environmental Programme estimated – guessed would be the more appropriate word – that over a million sea birds and 100,000 marine mammals are killed annually by plastic in the oceans. And it is all nonsense. 

The leading scientific study was carried out in 1997 by David Laist of the Us Marine Mammal Commission. In 2008 he confirmed his findings: “Plastic bags don’t figure in entanglement. The main culprits are fishing gear, ropes, lines and strapping bands. Most mammals are too big to get caught up in a plastic bag". 

“The impact of bags on whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals ranges from nil for most species to very minor for perhaps a few species. 

For birds, plastic bags are not a problem either.” The claim that more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds die every year is based on a 1987 Canadian study that found that between 1981 and 1984 more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed. But the study does not mention plastic bags once. It is about discarded fishing nets.
EVEN Greenpeace accepts this. Three years ago one of its marine biologists David Santillo said: “It’s very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags. The evidence shows just the opposite. We are not going to solve the problem of waste by focusing on plastic bags. With larger mammals it’s fishing gear that’s the big problem. On a global basis plastic bags aren’t an issue.”  

Even the supposed fact that they take 1,000 years to degrade is nothing of the sort. Some studies have indeed come up with the 1,000 year figure. But others say it is very rare for a plastic bag to survive for longer than 10 or 20 years. The truth is we simply don’t know.
Many of the so-called environmentally friendly alternatives are actually worse. Friends of the earth says that paper bags are more damaging to the environment: “you can use and use and use plastic bags but paper bags, material bags and degradable bags all release methane once they are thrown away which is worse than carbon dioxide for the climate.” 

Plastic bags make up just 0.03 per cent of the UK’s litter. We need to start acting on evidence, not myth.