Designing recycled plastic and plastic free packaging into the product

Ask most publishers where the plastic in a covermount is and they will point at the toy. Weigh it and you often find the toy is the smaller half.

The blister, the backing card's laminate, the polybag, the ties: the packaging routinely carries as much plastic as the thing it protects, and unlike the toy, none of it survives the first thirty seconds after purchase.

Three changes that hold up

Recycled content in the moulding. Hard-wearing polystyrene with 30 per cent recycled content behaves close enough to virgin material for a moulded figure that a child cannot tell and a buyer can measure. It is the least visible change and the easiest to certify, and GRS certification is available for the recycled input where a client needs the paperwork.

Losing the blister. A card box with no plastic window, closed with paper ties rather than plastic ones, does the same job. It costs a little more in board and saves more than that in plastic. The one thing it changes is that the buyer can no longer see the product through the pack, which is a marketing decision rather than a manufacturing one and needs settling early.

Printing the inside of the box. This is the change that pays for itself. If the inside of the pack is printed as a play scene, the packaging stops being waste at the moment of opening and becomes part of the product. It adds a print pass and nothing else.

One that usually does not

Swapping a moulded plastic item for a moulded biodegradable one sounds like the obvious move and rarely survives contact with a covermount's constraints. Bio-based materials are more brittle, less consistent batch to batch, and have tighter tolerances on wall thickness, which matters when the item has to pass the same drop and small-parts testing as its predecessor. It can be the right answer. It is almost never the first thing to try.

Where to start

Weigh the pack. Split the weight between product and packaging. Whichever side is heavier is where the work is, and in our experience it is the side nobody looks at.