The fruit trees in our permaculture forest garden are currently working hard to produce our first crop of fruit. So far I've seen apples, pears, blueberries, melon pears, pomegranetes (although these are very small won't get big enough to eat), cape gooseberries, japanese wineberries, pinapple guava (acca sellowiana), chilean guava (ugno mollinae), and even a very small bunch of grapes! All our trees are still very small, so there won't be a huge harvest this year, but it's exciting to see so many berries and fruits developing as time goes on. I think all this wet weather we've been having has done them all a lot of good and has meant that we haven't had to worry about watering them. You can find a few pictures of some of the fruits in the garden here, but in the meantime, here's a picture of one of our good old English apples

At Alara we use a lot of labels on our products. Everything that leaves our factory will have at least one label on it somewhere so we probably apply about 5 million labels every year! Although this won't contribute much to the weight of the overall product because the labels typically weigh less than 1 gram, it's still important to think about their environmental impact. I've recently been talking to our label supplier about whether they could make labels for us on recycled paper instead of paper made from virgin material, and whether we can have our labels printed with vegetable based inks. Apparently none of their other customers have asked them for this before so it seems we are the pioneers of sustainable labels!

The labels themselves are only half the battle though because all our labels are supplied on a backing paper which is currently just thrown away. The worst thing is that this backing paper is not recyclable in the UK because it is coated in silicon to make it easy to peel the labels off. Paper mills will not accept this material with other paper because it does not break down into pulp very easily when back at the paper mill. Our label supplier said that there's only one factory in Europe that recycles backing paper and it is in Germany so it's not worth the extra transport costs to collect all the backing paper for recycling. There are no alternative backing papers available for use at the moment either because there just isn't any demand on the industry to provide it.

I even contacted NISP (National Industrial Symbiosis Programme) about the label backing paper problem as they specialise in finding ways of reusing or recycling awkward materials but with no success. So if there are any other businesses out there reading this blog that use large quantities of labels, I urge you to talk to your label supplier about recycling backing paper. It seems that the only way things are going to change is if we create a demand for a recycling process that deals with this waste.