Sustainability is Part of Our DNA

Entec Polymers Provides Resins and Compounds to Enable Your Sustainable Solutions

Is sustainability here to stay? You bet it is! It doesn’t matter where you live, who you work for or what you do for a living, sustainability touches every single person. Whether you read plastics industry magazines, your local newspaper or scan social media sites, all you see are articles about plastic waste, litter, circular economy, recycling, and sustainability. Many major brand owners and other large companies are all committing to use more post-consumer recycled materials in their products, to reduce the amount of material in their packaging, or to try and collect their used packaging in order to recycle it. Because of this, sustainability touches all of us whether we realize it or not. The US EPA gives the following definition for sustainability: “Everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment. To pursue sustainability is to create and maintain the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony to support present and future generations.” However, to some people it may more simply mean to use materials or products produced from renewable resources. To others it may be more about recycling. To go even further, it may be about reducing and reusing products and materials.

At Entec Polymers, we live sustainability every day through the products and services we offer. As a distributor for many major polymer producers, we work hard to ensure we have the most sustainable supply chain. That means, reducing over the road miles, road wear and greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. These efforts have the added benefit of minimizing freight costs. From a polymer technology point of view, we work with our customers to help them reach their sustainability goals on new as well as existing applications. In the automotive market this could be through light-weighting parts or efforts to utilize more post-consumer recycled materials. In the packaging market, this could be through down-gauging film thickness, introducing recycled materials into interior film layers, converting multi-material laminates to all polyethylene-based structures for easier recyclability or utilizing more bio-based and compostable materials. In the medical market, it could be by eliminating PVC and phthalates and using lower density materials and more environmentally friendly materials. Furthermore, by using innovative additive technologies we can help reduce energy consumption during processing or substituting with more processable materials. In the compounding market it could be introducing recycled feed-stock resins or through the use of enabling additives like impact modifiers, compatibilizers, or specialty additives such as odor scavengers, nucleating agents and NIR black colorants. All of these efforts and solutions are designed to help ensure that we can minimize the environmental impact of ourselves, our customers, our products and their end use applications.

At Entec Polymers, we’re all about helping our customers achieve and develop their sustainability goals.