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CHOOSE TO RE-USE…

How much packaging is the Art & Framing industry failing to recycle?

When it comes to packaging or storing a painting framed or unframed, the first challenge is to find a suitable container that will fit the painting. Traditionally bubble wrap has been used within our industry for many years. Large rolls that are not easy to store and once you have sealed it up with tape, it is never easy to unwrap and re-use.

Believe it or not it is easy to cut down on packaging, whilst also saving time and money. Have we got your attention now?

While bubble wrap does a wonderful job of protecting genuinely fragile items, do we really need so much of it? Bubble wrap is made from polythene, the world’s most commonly manufactured plastic. According to the British Plastics Federation, the UK uses more than five million tonnes of plastic each year of which only an estimated 24 per cent is recycled.

A good record on recycling is no guarantee that a council will take on the bubble wrap challenge.

Not one of the ten councils in this country, with the best record on recycling, judged by the percentage of waste recycled in 2013/2014, accepts bubble wrap in their bins.

The truth seems to be that many councils take the view that since it is bulky and unwieldy, it is much easier to send to landfill.

However, there are now reusable products being introduced onto the market that are actually more protective for storing and protecting artwork and frames.

Add up the costs of bubblewrap, tape, foam corners and andywrap and you can end up spending more money than if you invest into reusable art bags. Then time how long it takes to wrap up the frames to a sufficient standard to protect them for either your customers to collect or for you to send out on a delivery. Have you worked out that equation of how much your time costs in your business?

In an industry that over the years has taken more care with all the materials being used to help protect the customers artworks and frames by raising the standards of the use of archival products.

ArtPakks, rebranded from Smartbags, offer the most protective, archival standard of art bag available. The development of this art bag is a result of a framer, gallery owner and artist looking at all the problems caused with using bubble wrap to pack up artworks and frames. They have developed an archival art bag, that has an acid free lining whilst incorporating a shock absorbent material, that is water resistant, mould repellent, has insulation properties, which is useful when storing artworks and moreover, they are extremely strong. They have been tested to take weight up to 50kg.

Introducing the use of reusable art bags into the framing industry will help cut down on the amount of packaging we are throwing away every week. Industries all over the world are beginning to look at the amounts of waste they are producing that are not only filling up the landfill sites, the seas and wastelands around the world, causing short term damage to wildlife and long-term damage to our planet.

Just take a moment to look at the packaging you are using, times that by how many framers and galleries there are in the UK, then add the number of artists and imagine the bubblewrap mountain we are building.

It may be a larger investment of your hard-earned money at first, but the benefits of time and costs become apparent in the end using reusable packaging repeatedly and most importantly if all we do our little bit the results will be amazing!