Turning Off the Tap
The president of a packaging company is determined
to help solve the problem of plastic pollution.
B Y J I M Mc D ONA L D
THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE IS THE ENTHUSIASM. AND, HARD ON ITS HEELS, THE COMMAND
OF VERY TECHNICAL SUBJECT MATTER. FOLLOWING THAT COMES THE MISSIONARY ZEAL,
THE SENSE OF A LIFE MISSION TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE — A POSITIVE DIFFERENCE — IN THE
OVERALL HEALTH OF THE PLANET AND ITS INHABITANTS.
Wes Carter, a Wrightsville
Beach native and president of
Atlantic Packaging — and an
avid surfer in his 40s — is on
a mission: to move consumer
products away from single-use
plastic packaging, a major
cause of ocean pollution.
“What I believe I can do in
the area where we have a lot
of influence, is we can help
turn off the tap,” he says
from his Wilmington office.
His company — the
largest privately held
product packaging com-pany
april 2022
in North America
— has taken on sus-tainability
and environ-mental
responsibility
as a prime directive.
By designing, devel-oping
and offering
environmentally
friendly packaging
solutions to the
large consumer
brands, Atlantic
Packaging is
helping reduce
the flow of
“bad plastics” into the environ-ment.
But merely reducing the
stream of problem plastics
isn’t enough. Sustainable, plan-et-
friendly packaging alterna-tives
are needed to replace the
bad stuff. Through develop-ment
of fiber-based solutions,
Carter hopes to help move the
industry away from the unrecy-clable
single-use plastic bot-tles,
wrappers and containers
clogging landfills and polluting
oceans.
“It’s not my role to be the sci-entist,”
Carter says, “but it is my
role to know the science.”
Apparently, he’s a quick
study. He is short-notice ready
to discuss the ins and outs of
recycling, what works and what
doesn’t. Take, for example, your
recycling bin.
“Here’s what’s so important,”
Carter says. “For the most
part the American public has
had the wool pulled over their
eyes about recycling because
most people don’t understand
what’s actually recycled. Most
of the plastic you put in your
recycling bin does not get
recycled. You send it to the
recycling center; they take it
off the conveyor as it’s sorted
and sent to the landfill. So it’s
really, really important that
people become more educat-ed
about what is actually recy-cled
and what is not.
“Grocery bags, flexible pack-aging,
films, things like that,” he
says. “None of that is getting
recycled. The municipal recy-cling
facilities cannot handle
it. It doesn’t flow through their
system very well. And even if
they could handle it, it’s not
worth anything to them. But
things like aluminum recycle
really well. And corrugated
cardboard recycles really well
because, first of all, their con-veyor
systems and robotic sort-ers
can easily pick out three-di-mensional
objects.”
Carter has had several “aha!”
moments that led to a determi-nation
to be part of the solution
in reducing the onslaught of
non-recyclable packaging.
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WBM