EPS fish boxes keep fish fresh from port to market

Brus­sels —Vis­i­tors to a bustling fish mar­ket can be for­giv­en when their eyes are drawn to the huge vari­ety of fresh fish and to the colour­ful fish­er­men sell­ing them. Who notices the hum­ble fish box, with­out which the fish might not be fresh at all?

As Smart Pack­ag­ing Europe shows in a new­ly pub­lished fact sheet, expand­ed poly­styrene (EPS) is the pack­ag­ing mate­r­i­al of choice for fresh­ly caught fish on its way to whole­sale mar­kets, not to men­tion all kinds of oth­er goods, world-wide. One rea­son is its excel­lent insu­la­tion prop­er­ties, which help keep fish fresh and reduce food waste. The EPS fish box allows the fish trade to offer fresh fish far from the sea­side in super­mar­kets and restau­rants world-wide.

EPS also offers oth­er ben­e­fits, includ­ing resist­ing humid­i­ty, which in turn pre­vents the spread of bac­te­ria and fun­gi. Its inher­ent­ly light weight, which also saves ener­gy dur­ing trans­port across the whole logis­tics chain from the har­bour to the super­mar­ket counter. More­over, a large pro­por­tion of fish box­es are recy­cled, with recy­cling rates in Nor­way, Den­mark and the Nether­lands in excess of 80%.

Some reports that equate lit­ter count­ed on beach­es with ocean plas­tic have focused on poly­styrene (PS) because foamed PS floats. But they do not accu­rate­ly reflect the state of our oceans, which con­cerns all of us, as most plas­tics hang in the water col­umn or fall to the sea floor.

The EPS indus­try is ful­ly com­mit­ted to pro­tect­ing the envi­ron­ment. The new fact sheet includes sev­er­al exam­ples, such as how BEWI, a Smart Pack­ag­ing Europe sup­port­er, is quick­ly expand­ing its col­lab­o­ra­tion with Doca Pesca in Por­tu­gal to col­lect EPS fish box­es for recy­cling in fish­ing ports. In Italy, the Ital­ian EPS nation­al asso­ci­a­tion has ini­ti­at­ed a coop­er­a­tion with Fed­er­pesca, the Ital­ian fish­ery fed­er­a­tion, on a whole series of cir­cu­lar econ­o­my projects with local small businesses.

Rais­ing aware­ness of the many uses of EPS and address­ing mis­con­cep­tions about it are why we are here. You can down­load the full fact sheet here and find more infor­ma­tion on EPS fish box­es on this ded­i­cat­ed web­site.