What’s the deal with the Plastic Soup again?
March 15 2024 That’s what readers of news site nu.nl on their comment platform Nujij were wondering. In a recent […]
September 2019: Tins of Red Bull on number 1, said the headlines of our press releases last year after counting all the trash found at World Cleanup Day 2019. But what about the other products and brands found on the street and the roadside? What was picked up the most and registered as litter via the Litterati app? And what are the stories behind it?
In the run-up to World Cleanup Day 2020 (on 19 September) we will bring a countdown of the TOP 6!
The litter registered on the Litterati app last year – 78,000 items – consisted mainly of plastic: 61%! A lot of plastic bags, foil and disposable cutlery, but also a lot of sweet wrappers.
Anta flu wrappers were found so often that they ended up in 6th place. A bit crazy maybe to put together a top 6 instead of a top 5, but the story behind the Anta Flu wrappers is too good not to tell.
In 2017, two men, Dirk Groot (Zwerfinator) and Merjin Tinga (Plastic Soup Surfer) decided to fight Anta Flu’s plastic wraps, which were lying all over the place, and to call on their followers to pick up all the wrappers they find and tag them in Litterati. There were more than 30,000 of them!
With that data, they then went to the producer, Pervasco in Rotterdam. And voila, since 2020 the Anta Flu sweets were no longer wrapped in plastic but in paper (on the photo on the left the old plastic wrapper and on the right the already torn paper one).
According to the CEO of Pervasco, this move had nothing to do with the action of Groot and Tinga. They did this purely ‘on their own initiative’. “For some time now we had been looking at how we could make this product with as little impact on the environment as possible.” But we suspect that the extra push certainly helped. Hats off to you, guys!
Anta Flu’s website says that the sweets are now packaged in wax wrappers made of ‘material originating from FSC® certified forests’. According to the producer, the vegetable wax slows down the biodegradation process of the paper a bit, but the wax paper will decompose eventually, unlike the plastic wraps. So that’s why we say hats off to you too, Pervasco!
Of course, we hope that all the plastic packaging found on the street and in the environment will be replaced by biodegradable material! And if Pervasco can do it, so can you: Unilever, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, Mars, Albert Heijn…
– Elles Tukker, Communications Manager, Plastic Soup Foundation
Will you join World Cleanup Day? Take a look at www.worldcleanupday.nl to see the cleanup actions that have already been set up in your neighbourhood or put a cleanup action on the map yourself!
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