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PMMI's Board of Directors added 34 new companies to the PMMI membership at its April 13 meeting, held in conjunction with PMMI's Executive Leadership Conference.

In response to the increasing and widespread demand for carton recycling access in communities large and small, the Carton Council of North America has unveiled a new website, CartonOpportunities.org, designed to provide comprehensive information on the opportunities created for recycling professionals, elected officials and the entire packaging supply chain through carton recycling. The site also supplements an existing and popular website, RecycleCartons.com, which is focused on educating consumers.

Twenty-three colleges and universities in New England have joined an EPA effort to cut the amount of food that goes to waste. This doubles the participation of EPA’s Food Recovery Challenge in 2013, since eleven New England colleges and universities were already participating in the challenge. In 2011, these schools recovered a total of 4,538 tons of food.

Every day, large quantities of milk and juice are consumed in schools across the country, so it’s a natural fit for schools to develop and implement school-based carton recycling programs. Recognizing the fast-growing pace of carton recycling, this year Keep America Beautiful created a special category for carton recycling in its popular annual competition called Recycle-Bowl.

It was not that long ago that the idea of buying water in a bottle seemed outrageously quirky to most people, but over the past few decades the demand for packaged water has rocketed exponentially. Just ten years ago world consumption stood at one hundred billion liters. Since then, and despite the global downturn, volumes have actually doubled. Perhaps even more amazing is that, according to Canadean’s latest calculations, packaged water will actually overtake carbonates as the leading soft drinks category in just two years. This anticipated result is being bolstered by its healthy image, plus actual necessity in those areas of the world lacking alternative, safe, water supplies.

The insatiable curiosity surrounding the Millennial generation (current age 18-35) is certainly not a new topic – but the importance of this complex demographic is growing, especially for grocery retailers. An apparent trend has surfaced, leading fickle (but abundant) Millennial dollars away from traditional grocery stores and into the hands of farmer’s markets, online and specialty retailers. A combination of factors, including health, status, convenience, freshness and ethics – all play an important role in these consumers’ purchase decisions.

Waitrose announces a target to cut its packaging in half by 2016. The retailer has announced three major changes to its product ranges that will help achieve this target, together saving nearly 100 metric tons of packaging each year.

One of the nation’s top brewers, MillerCoors, has recently joined the Organization for Machine Automation and Control (OMAC).

Five leading packaging companies in North America and Europe announced they intend to combine in order to operate as one global leader under the banner of Exopack Holdings Sarl, a new Luxembourg company. The combined business will have 63 plants, 8,650 employees and aggregate revenues of more than US$2.5B, making it the sixth-largest plastics packaging company in the world.

In 2012, total U.S. bottled water consumption increased to 9.67 billion gallons, up from 9.1 billion gallons in 2011. In fact, 2012’s consumption growth was the strongest it has been in five years. In addition, per-capita consumption is up 5.3% in 2012, with every person in America drinking an average of 30.8 gallons of bottled water last year. Bottled water increased in absolute volume more than any other beverage category in the U.S.