Welcome to Episode 4 of the Paper and Plastic Show with your host, Osman Hameed We are recording from The beautiful Ocean Ridge Studios in Toronto, Canada. Today we're going to be talking about sustainability. This is a word that always gets, you know, overly discussed. And sometimes one of those cliche words now that sustainability, we wanna be sustainable, we wanna be, have sustainable practices. It's become like a buzzword, but it doesn't not mean that it's not super important, super essential. And that's why today's episode, that's going to be the theme of today's episode. So there's a company called Tetra Pak. that makes, you know, your juice boxes and all of your milk cartons, they're called Tetra Pak and the material is also called Tetra Pak because they patented this material many, many years ago. And it's that material that, you know, like if you buy a juice box, it looks like this on the inside and this sort of material that it protects your liquid and food and drink products. From you know, obviously coming out of the box because if you were to pour Milk or water or drinks inside a regular paper, you know material paper container at some point It'll begin to seep out so tetrapak was able to find A very cool and patterned way to keep that material on the inside They put like a foil sort of mylar layer inside the material to keep that liquid inside. Anyhow they're world acclaimed world famous. Everybody knows Tetra Pak. If you don't look at your juice box next time and look at the flaps on the sides, you'll see a small Tetra Pak logo, almost universal on your apple juices, mango juices that you give to the kids or, you know, any of your milk cartons, um, that you might be using, particularly in Europe, but also here in North America. So anyhow, the Tetra Pak recently announced that they're investing 40 million euros. That would be about like what nowadays they're considered currency, right? Maybe about like 41, 42 million. USD to enhance the recycling of their cartons, global cartons. Talk about putting money where your mouth is. And that's what the actual answer to sustainability is. Don't just talk about it. Don't just be like, hey, we want to be sustainable. Don't just be like, hey, just use paper straws. So therefore, you know, I'm changing the world. Put money where your mouth is and actually look at how can we reuse our material, and how can we get material that was previously not being able to recycle into material that we can reuse and, you know, reduce and recycle. So, that's something that's really happening, that's cool, happening in the industry. Tetra and it's something that I'm a big fan of. So, this material over here, typically, historically, it was not recyclable. You know, it's very hard to recycle this material, just how it's formed. It can't be re pulped and made into a new paper. So, that's really cool, information that, you know, hopefully they can find a good solution for it. I think it's, we use so many resources that I think we're not, we're almost ignorant to the fact that We are utilizing so many resources for our very, very small conveniences, you know, we drink water bottles, uh, we use, uh, cell phones, we buy furniture, um, everything we buy in North America, the culture is almost forced that it's a one time use. You go to McDonald's, you know, and they'll give you a paper cup that you'll use for just 20 minutes and you'll trash it. They'll give you a paper bag for your fries. You'll use it for like 20 seconds and you'll trash it. We have Tim Hortons here. This cup, I will drink the coffee and I'll trash it, And then sometimes you have multiple friends in the car, they'll give you a small tray and that tray is just used to grab the four cups from the drive thru, put it in your car, give each person their cup and trash the tray. That tray has a 25 second lifestyle, life cycle. Only use with 25 seconds, for many, many cases. So it's like these small, small things that we're just accustomed to, that we think is normal. That we just use for 25 seconds and dispose of is extremely extremely not just you know like almost toxic because you know We don't really think about the waste that we're doing but also a detriment environment to society as a whole And it's it's causing issues because now you have this global warming crisis coming up not coming. It's already started happening You find out a lot of countries are struggling because the carbons everywhere You know, there's so many negatives that are happening to it, but we're not cognizant of the fact that, we're using single use materials. And that's the real problem over here that why not look for ways to reuse and reduce our consumption and find ways to put material back in the cycle. And even if you're going to have one time use plastics or paper, find ways that you can put it back into a recycling stream. For that, I would have no issue. Using um, those trades with Tim Horton's if we knew that those trades were going to always make it back into new paper Because paper and plastic is actually very much Recyclable you can reuse them many many times. But if that system exists for that material to recycle, so I'll give you example plastic bottles I'm guilty We have some plastic bottles in the office. I understand there's a convenience to them. I'm not saying ban plastic bottles. there is a use case for them. I do exist, that does 100 percent exist, but making one plastic bottle uses about two liters of water and a quarter of a liter of oil to create. That's shocking. So to carry 500 ml of water, you got to first spend, you know, 2000 ml of water and 250 250 ml of, oil to create this plastic bottle. And then not just that, you use it for 20 minutes, 30 minutes and that's it. It's gone. Isn't that crazy? It's wild. And the thing is, I'm guilty. You're guilty. We're all guilty in the room because that's how society is created. And unless we start making fundamental differences and we started making changes at a fundamental level, that's not gonna, that's not gonna ever go away. So I think we gotta be thinking about recycling. You know, recycling one ton of plastic. That means that one ton is about 2000 pounds. You would save, 645 liters of oil and about 1535 liters of water. Okay. Recycling is a way to go. We can get this plastic bottles, you know, these are PET bottles. We can melt them down, put them, shred them, shred them, melt them down and make new plastic out of them. And that's what we got to do. We gotta be thinking of a sustainability difference. There's 1 billion people that live in the Western world as the North America and Europe. And 7 billion that live elsewhere that don't always have the same resources. End of the day, the goal is very simple. We have to first focus on reuse. then you got to focus on reduce And then you got to focus on recycle, some say reduce first sure reduce reuse and then recycle Sometimes it's so caught up in this one time use in landfill. That's the wrong approach. It's the wrong way Sustainability is the way to go at ocean ridge We're a huge fan of sustainability and finding creative ways to turn one man's trash into another man's treasure Thank you. That was episode four. We're gonna see you in episode five This is going to be a daily thing you want to see a lot of us We're proud of it. We're selecting cool again, and we want you guys to be part of the journey to help us make it happen. Take care.