Carton bread clips on shelves

The company located in Montérégie makes millions of bread clips each year using plastic beads. However, these fasteners are not recycled after use.

All the plastic we make here will go to landfills.underlined Nicolas Hamel, the president of KLR Systems.

He found that despite the moderate size of a fastener, the amount of plastic that enters the factory is negligible.

” What surprised me was seeing trucks every two or three weeks, 53 feet full of plastic. “

So he decided to act for the environment and develop a new type of ties made of recycled cardboard.

Apart from being recyclable, if you ever come home by accident, when you throw it in the trash, it’s not bad, because it’s compostable.he says.

Two production lines now produce 4 to 5 million cardboard clips per day.

“32 adult elephants” of plastic

The Bimbo company, which notably makes Pom, Bon Matin and Villaggio breads, has adopted these new attachments. They are slowly coming to the shelves.

The bread clips we have just launched on the market will allow us to reduce our use of single-use plastic by more than 200 tons per year, which could represent the equivalent of 32 adult elephants.said Bimbo Canada Communications Advisor Laurence Vallerand.

However, it’s not easy to convince all companies to go green, says Nicolas Hamel.

There is a lot of work to convince people to change their habits. You have to understand that people, operators, mechanics in factories have been working on this equipment for 30, 40, 50 years, working the same way on the same equipment. Bread clips have long existed in Canadahe says.

But the durability of plastic, which takes hundreds of years to break down, seems unrelated to bread, Hamel says.

” Bread has a very short shelf life. We do not expect to use this product for four years. “

The Estrie Regional Council for the Environment welcomes the initiative.

I think companies will start to do things like this, because the image of having environmental skills, I think is something that is becoming more and more popular, thank you. We hope this is more of a trend, and it will stay on timesaid Jacinthe Caron, executive director of the organization.

There is still room for improvement, he believes, however. Bread clips are a single use thing, we don’t reuse them. One day, we might invent a clip of bread that we can use again, but that’s a different story.

It remains to be seen if the other bread giants will choose cardboard in turn.

With information from Thomas Deshaies