Letter of the Month

Plastic wrap

I wondered whether you have any plans to stop using the plastic wrap Linux

Format comes in when posted? The wrapping is one of the few remaining items of plastic that enters our household! Replacement with something compostable or with paper would be great. Andy Beverley

Mark, head of production, says

We are investigating this – it’s on the agenda at the PPA Postal Committee, which I sit on, for further exploration. However, as an industry we face a number of challenges in this field. Alternative substrates to standard poly, such as potato/corn starch material, which we have seen used by the National Trust, are hugely expensive and to my knowledge are only available from a very limited number of suppliers – principally in Italy that require stringent regulations.

Anecdotally, this material is far harder to run down a mailing line so speeds are slow, meaning more production time is required – and it’s harder to seal effectively, due to the waxy nature of the product. It’s also semi-opaque, so could undermine our preferred method of addressing our subs copies using a carrier sheet. You can print on corn starch, but the guidelines are that print coverage should be limited to 10 per cent and only one colour. Use of this material is in its infancy and I need to do more research – however it seems to be commercially and logistically unviable to use at this time.

Using paper wrap is also another option, but again we have no viable, commercially sensible method of using current mailing machinery for this. There are some other alternatives such as using recycled wrap, but the information I have from our poly suppliers is that recycled wrap cannot actually be recycled again. I’m also told anecdotally that other ‘compostable’ options maybe aren’t so, unless you take them to an industrial composter say down your council tip.

Royal Mail is also tightening its postal requirements to using tight, clear wrap that enables its machines to read the barcoding on the carrier, or alternatively a fully opaque poly, again allowing reading of the barcode. Corn starch is neither, so would not allow barcodes to be read. We are more than aware that consumer interest and pressure on this issue is going to be mounting. Existing mailing machinery isn’t yet optimised to run alternative wrap material at the speeds our mailing houses require. Using these new materials needs to be costand time-effective before we can look to use them in our operations as a standard thing. I’m not convinced that they are there right now, but it’s certainly an area for further investigation.