For fishing, reusable wooden boxes with disposable trays in recycled and recyclable extruded polystyrene (XPS) are effective, more sustainable alternatives to EPS, expanded polystyrene, which is among the main waste abandoned at sea or on our coasts.
This is demonstrated by an analysis published by the WWF.
Once it ends up in the environment, EPS can break down into millions of microplastics (up to 67 million micro enano-plastics per cm2) and cause serious impacts on biodiversity, especially due to chemical additives released into the sea over time and which can be released into marine organisms that ingest them.
With 14,000 disposable EPS fish boxes per year, Italy is the largest consumer in the EU, but still recycles a small part of them.
The new WWF report "Innovative and sustainable packaging solutions to reduce the dispersion of plastic at sea" takes into consideration alternative packaging to EPS including disposable cassettes (recycled EPS, corrugated cardboard and bioplastic) and reusable cassettes (hard plastic and wood).
The WWF, with the "Re-thinking Fish Box" project, financed by the Flotilla Foundation, launched an experiment in 2023 to test the more sustainable alternative.
The solution identified consists of reusable wooden boxes with disposable trays in recycled and recyclable XPS.
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