Nordic moves to recycled plastic shipping reels

Nordic Semiconductor is changing over to component reels made from recycled plastics, becoming one of the first chip companies to make the switch, it said, and reducing plastic waste by almost 15,000kg/year.

The majority of the company’s component packaging reels are now made from re-ground high-impact polystyrene.

Nordic tested the recycled plastic component reels against its traditional non-recycled reels to tape-and-reel industry standards, and, it said, the packaging didn’t break during shipping, and didn’t jam in PCB placement machines.

“Our customers have put our recycled plastic component reels into their production processes without issue. We are delighted that we, together with our OSAT partners, have been able to achieve this milestone,” said Nordic supply chain v-p Ole-Fredrik Morken. “We make an effort to walk our green talk. There are many industry-standard, minimum good-practice regulations for what a semiconductor chip supplier should do to minimise its environmental impact. However, climate change and the environment are too important to work to minimum standards. You try to go beyond that and do your part for the environment. And that is what we’ve done here.”