The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc. (ISRI) presented Cascades Fine Papers Group of Saint-Jerome, Quebec, with its annual Design for Recycling Award. According to ISRI, the Design for Recycling Award candidates “must demonstrate progress towards ensuring that the products they build and create can be recycled safely and economically,” by eliminating materials that impede recycling, increasing the recyclable yield of materials, and/or increasing the use of recycled materials in manufacturing.
Cascades earned its ISRI award by developing and implementing a 100 percent Recycled and Recyclable Ream Wrapper for its fine paper that eliminates plastic contaminants, reduces waste, and turns waste that would have ended up in a landfill into a recyclable commodity.
“Having to discard the wrapper because it contaminated the paper recycling process was an issue for us,” said Julie Loyer, Communication and Sustainable Development Advisor at Cascades Specialty Products Group. “We created a multidisciplinary team to find a solution and we created a packaging that is as environmentally friendly as the paper it wraps.”
Past winners of the Design for Recycling Award include Wind Simplicity, Coca-Cola Recycling Company, The Herman Miller Company, Hewlett Packard and the Environmental Protection Agency.
“Most companies and design engineers are rightly concerned with things like consumer needs, production costs, energy efficiency, and safety,” said ISRI President Robin Wiener. “But rarely do you find companies that put emphasis on what happens to their products when they have reached the end of their useful life. It is evident that Cascades is one such company that is concerned with overall life cycle of their products and producer product responsibility.”
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