A blog about transparent triggers? Of course! Recently we have seen that there is increasing attention for less coloring agents in packaging. Very nice for those companies, but it is not very innovative. After all, our triggers have been colorless for years and contain no metal parts. And therefore: easy to recycle.
You know them: the cheerfully colored triggers (or spray heads) of cleaning agents. Green, red, blue… colors that stand out. But in the professional market they also have a function, says purchaser Rob Kuijpers. “The colors indicate the type of product. Green is a floor cleaner, red is for scrubbing sanitary facilities, and you can clean the interior with a bottle with a blue trigger.”
Very handy, all those colors. But… not sustainable at all. Rob: “Colored plastic is impossible to recycle into transparent plastic. The result remains a cloudy, dirty color. Not so strange, because it doesn't go together. You don't throw colored laundry with the white laundry either." It is only possible to recycle colored packaging into colored packaging or to downcycle into something else.
More mono
That is why our triggers are always transparent. And the best part is: they have been since 2014! The same goes for the caps, dispenser pumps and other closures we use. According to Rob, this has everything to do with our sustainability strategy.
“Our closures have been transparent since 2014”
“At Spectro, we work every day to minimize our impact. So the following applies: the more mono-material we use for our packaging, the better we can recycle it. Our packaging is therefore made as much as possible from one type of plastic: HDPE. That is easy to melt down, which makes such packaging extremely recyclable.”
Recycle factory
To reinforce our ambition to recycle as much as possible, we came up with the Recycle Factory. We recycle and reuse empty packaging under our own management. Rob: “We challenge our customers to return as much packaging as possible. We give them a container in which they can collect the old packaging. We will then pick them up again. That costs them nothing.”
Back at Spectro, we rinse the used packaging and then shred it. We use these chips to make new packaging. “Pure win-win”, concludes Rob. “But that is only possible with transparent triggers. That's why ours have been for almost a decade. Talk about innovation!”
