This article is part of Precious Plastic, a One Army project tackling the plastic waste problem. You can learn more
here.
This company is working 24/7 and makes around 700 million products each year, that’s about 2 million products every single day! They make plastic foam containers to store your vegetables/meat/fish etc. You can find them in the supermarket wrapped with a transparant foil around, not so much anymore in The netherlands though. Supermarkets here decided we want fully transparant containers so we can see also the bottom of our meat. Anyway, it starts with clean new plastic, extrude this with gas to turn it into foam, this is cut and shaped into big rolls. These go on the thermoforming machine. They heat the plastic again and press it with a mold into a a sheet of little containers. This is cut and packed to ship all over europe. Plastic left-over is shredded and put back into the system, or pressed into little block and then used for thermo-heating elsewhere..