agricultural waste

The initiative was launched in 2019 and those now signed up include fashion and beauty e-tail giant Zalando, plus brands Mango, ba&sh, Ardene, and Nicholas Kirkwood. The new brands bring the total number of Pack4Good partners to 317.

Canopy said they’ve all “committed to revolutionising their packaging supply chains to protect vital forests all over the planet”.

Hive Energy joined up with Horsham-based Nafici Group to invest in Nafici Environmental Research (NER) which converts agricultural waste, including wheat straw, into EcoPulp; an alternative to wood-based pulps in the production of paper packaging materials.

The firm said it decided to act as packaging is a major environmental concern, with many industries looking to move away from non-biodegradable, fossil-fuel plastics.

Ultimately the young company, based near London, is capitalizing on the need for packaging materials while working to save a lot of trees that would otherwise have served as feedstock. And at the same time, it’s making use of that glut of crop byproduct.

NAFICI’s brainchild is a process to transform agriculture residues into paper pulp for the packaging industry. The two primary applications are corrugated boards and food service packaging.