Gimme 5 Impact
These three principles have inspired our company since 1996 and they continue to be our touchstones today. As we encourage more households to choose our 100% recycled and recyclable products over conventional options, our message is grounded in the sincerity, transparency and honesty of our commitment to reducing consumption and waste, and reusing and recycling materials whenever possible.
Our plastic products are made from #5 polypropylene plastic collected from individual consumers, via our Gimme 5 program, and from companies like Stonyfield. Polypropylene is a safe, food-grade material, primarily used to create packaging and products that have a lower environmental impact.
Through a recycling process that includes sorting, washing, melting, re-pelletizing and testing, we turn that “old” plastic into new raw materials that we use to create new Preserve products. When you choose a Preserve plastic product, you’re choosing a significant reduction in greenhouse gases emitted, and substantially less water, energy, oil, natural gas and coal than it takes to make the same product out of new plastic.
How much of a reduction?
Life Cycle Assessment
Preserve uses a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tool to evaluate the environmental impact of our materials, products and services. The LCA measures the environmental impact of a product or system’s entire life cycle, from raw material sourcing to manufacture to disposal. For us, this includes transporting source materials, making Preserve products with them, getting the product to stores and your doorstep and, finally, what happens to the product when the customer is done with it.
The LCA takes into account emissions, resource depletion and land use changes that may occur during:
• Extraction from nature
• Materials processing
• Product manufacturing
• Distribution and sales
• Use and upgrading
• End of life disposition to landfill, incineration or recycling
• Transportation between stages or within each stage
To better understand the environmental impacts of recycled polypropylene, Preserve purchased Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) data on our own recycled polypropylene and virgin polypropylene from PE Americas, a global sustainability consulting firm. This LCI data tracks every stage in the making of polypropylene, as well as all the waste created by the manufacturing process (including water and energy usage, pollutants, etc.).
PE Americas based their analysis of Preserve on a standard data model representing the manufacture of virgin and recycled polypropylene in America. To customize this data for our manufacturing methods, we provided some specific numbers such as our recycling scrap rate, contamination rate, and machine energy consumption. We then adjusted the resultant numbers to arrive at the environmental difference percentages above.
These numbers were derived from average data for America, so there are likely differences between our specific recycling processes and the industry average. There are also numerous assumptions involved when calculating environmental impact, such as machine efficiency, the types of trucks used to transport the plastic to be recycled and how full those trucks are—just to name a few. Preserve reduced these numbers by 20% to account for these differences in our process.