Grrreetings Heidi,
Thanks so much for giving us a growl about BEAR’s products :).
To give you a little information about our packaging, our cardboard multipack, and family pack boxes are both fully recyclable – we use only FSC (http://www.fsc-uk.org/) certified or recycled board for all our outer cases. They are also compostable – low migration (water-based) ink is printed on the boxes which means that the packaging is safe to compost as no nasties (grrr!) will seep into the ground from the ink.
We would love for all our packaging to be fully recyclable, but unfortunately right now the only way to preserve the goodness of our fruit in our single packs is to use the packaging we have, which is coated in order to protect the fruit – otherwise we would use paper which is, of course, recyclable. The BEAR Yoyos/Paws/Claws wrappers may be recyclable at some specialist recycling points, but probably not in your home recycling scheme.
We care a lot about protecting our natural environment and are always looking for ways to improve our packaging and business overall in this area. We’re not perfect, but we’re doing the best we can. Here are some of the things we are doing right now:
– We minimise the thickness of our packaging material, for example, our packets have a material thickness of 50 microns and the material is mono material and clean polypropylene which can easily be recycled where local collection and sorting schemes exist.
– We always ship all our products and never ever fly them to minimise our carbon footprint.
Thanks again for your message Heidi – we want to protect the world and all it’s BEARilliant creatures too, so we think it’s great when cubs and their parents get in touch to growl about this. We aim to be fully recyclable as soon as we can.
Big BEAR hugs,
Elinor
Hello,
I was also after an answer to the above question.
Would it be better to have full plastic wrappers that can be red cycled in Australia ?
I’m an enthusiastic environmentalist and don’t want unnecessary production of plastics. However potentially having just soft plastic packaging (for the individual snacks) rather than the plastic coated paper might be better for the environment. Nothing going to landfill.
Something to consider
Cheers
Georgia
Hi Georgia – it is a good point! There seems little point in using paper and then coating in plastic and I think it is often to make people think they are buying a more eco-friendly option, which I find very dishonest! Hopefully all manufacturers will start to look at things differently now. Thanks for your input.