EPS helps fishermen get their catch

Brus­sels —Human beings have been fish­ing almost as long as they’ve been hunt­ing and gath­er­ing fruits and berries. Nor­mal­ly it tends to be quite relax­ing. But it can some­times be frus­trat­ing to sit for hours with­out a bite. Were the fish sleep­ing that day or was I not feed­ing them what they want­ed, the fish­er­man might wonder?

Expand­ed poly­styrene (EPS) offers a par­tial solu­tion. It turns out that in addi­tion to pro­tect­ing fruit, veg­eta­bles and fish, EPS offers excel­lent pack­ag­ing for live worms.

One of Smart Pack­ag­ing Europe’s mem­bers, HIRSCH Porozell, last year suc­cess­ful­ly test­ed the pro­duc­tion of pro­tec­tive trans­port pack­ag­ing made of 100% recy­cled EPS. The recy­cled EPS for the box­es comes from BEWI RAW and Novopol, which devel­oped the box for their cus­tomer Proin­sects, and now they are pro­duc­ing them so they can trans­port Cana­di­an Taw­worms that are larg­er than ‘nor­mal’ nightcrawlers.

These worms are col­lect­ed by hand in nature under suit­able weath­er con­di­tions and sent all over the world as they can­not be bred eco­nom­i­cal­ly.  But they are more sen­si­tive to tem­per­a­ture than night­crawlers. So, an EPS box that offers excel­lent pro­tec­tive and insu­la­tion prop­er­ties comes in handy to allow them to be export­ed to fish­er­men world-wide. More­over, the EPS pack­ag­ing is made of recy­cled EPS; Novopol oper­ates the first mechan­i­cal EPS recy­cling plant in Europe in the Czech Republic.

So thanks to EPS’s excel­lent insu­la­tion and shock resis­tance, those EPS worm box­es might help fish­er­men find more plea­sure in their hob­by. The use of recy­cled EPS to make new EPS pack­ages, mean­while, is a good exam­ple of mak­ing pack­ag­ing more sustainable.