Dow has teamed with dairy brand Shiny Meadow to construct China’s first road made with recycled plastic milk bottles. The project gives hard-to-recycle plastic a second life and helps keep plastic waste out of the oceans, landfills, streets and rivers.

The “Milk Bottle Road” used more than 6,000 used milk bottles and other plastic waste and is located at the East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST) Xuhui campus. Although milk bottles are easily recycled, recyclers often reject milk bottles due to the high contamination rate caused by milk residue.

Tetra Tech’s 2021 Sustainability Report shares our progress during our first decade of sustainability reporting and our environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments for 2030.

Across industries, sustainability is becoming an increasing expectation. From reducing emissions to increasing recycling, both businesses and consumers are looking for ways in which they can reduce their environmental impact. But when it comes to products and packaging in the life science industry, developing sustainable solutions while meeting transit and safety regulation requirements is an ongoing challenge.

Now, imagine the complexity of executing this process for more than 300,000 products and 2.5 million SKUs along with associated packaging.

In April 2019, the Life Science business of Merck* launched a four-year initiative that was aimed at improving its sustainability efforts when it came to packaging. For a global business shipping around 30,000 packages every day, the task was enormous. From reducing the overall amount of packaging it was using, maximising recycling, improving plastics sustainability and even targeting zero deforestation, the initiative was a statement of intent by the business to begin to understand its environmental impact – and do something about it.