12-14 July 2023
National Exhibition and Convention Center · Shanghai · China

Making the impossible possible: A major flexible packaging breakthrough

 

2018-11-21 11:52:29 25

 

Amcor’s R&D team achieves a major breakthrough in more sustainable high barrier and retort packaging, demonstrating significant progress toward the company’s 2025 Pledge.

 

October 15, 2018

 

Flexible plastic packaging protects a vast and increasing number of consumer goods. It is easily converted into attractive formats, and creates convenient, lightweight packaging with a smaller carbon footprint than glass or aluminium containers. But these very benefits make flexible packaging a challenge to recycle. And that means too much plastic packaging ends up in landfills or incinerators or even in the environment.

 

Consumers are increasingly aware of this conundrum. We want safe, fresh and convenient products – and we want them packaged with more sustainable materials.

 

But, to date, flexible packaging materials that deliver the highest levels of product-protection have not been widely recyclable. This packaging, including high barrier and retort packaging, protects ready-meals to wet pet-food, coffee to personal-care products. It delivers high barrier protection by using high performing materials; usually combining different plastics and often including aluminium.

 

Take a common example, where aluminium foil is combined with polyethylene terephthalate (PET) film, like in the case of some snacks, nuts, and coffee packaging. PET has all the hallmarks of an ideal packaging material: it runs well on production machines, works well as a base-film for barrier coatings, has excellent seal-performance, is heat resistant and our customers can run it easily on filling lines. PET and aluminium are also very heat-resistant, so it is the material of choice for products that require high heat processing, such as retort or heat sterilization. It’s high performing in nearly all areas – but its Achilles’ heel is that it is not recyclable.

 

The challenge for Amcor and for our customers was to find a suitable replacement for PET for high barrier and retort applications, that can also be recycled.

 

Innovating to solve the “impossible”

 

As more consumer goods companies make commitments to use only recyclable or reusable packaging, high barrier and retort packaging were seen by many as insurmountable problems. There was no satisfactory alternative to achieve the needed levels of performance while also meeting criteria for recyclability.

 

But Amcor people like finding solutions. Particularly if we’ve been told it’s impossible.

 

Over the past few years, Amcor R&D experts have been working to create a mono-material polyolefin film that both meets the demands of products that require high barrier and retort, and can also be recycled.

 

Earlier this year, our colleagues achieved that breakthrough: developing a polyolefin-based film that provides the performance, barrier protection and heat tolerance to make it a real alternative to PET. The new film delivers excellent performance for barrier and heat processing without compromising packaging function and product shelf-life, and it’s suitable for existing polyolefin recycling streams. Packaging Europe called it “the El Dorado of flexible packaging”.

 

Amcor’s innovative film is a building block for a major evolution in high performance packaging, allowing us to develop next generation versions of our full AmLite range of metal-free high barrier laminates.

 

To cover multiple applications, the new polyolefin film is being developed in three grades: ambient medium-barrier; ambient high-barrier and retort high-barrier. For retort packaging, it’s a first for the market and a game-changer for Amcor and our customers.

 

Industry experts are excited by our breakthrough, selected customers are testing it on their machines, and we are energised to solve other seemingly impossible challenges on the journey to delivering on our 2025 Pledge.

The popularity of flexible high barrier and retort packaging is growing and Amcor’s new film means products will be protected, and the environment will be better protected too.

 

What other challenges remain?

 

Unlike for PET bottles and containers, there is currently no standard criteria to define recyclability of flexible packaging. In part, this is because a product’s recyclability is dictated by the recycling stream that it falls into, and different criteria exist for each stream. For flexible packaging, the recycling streams are: aluminium (defined as containing more than 30% aluminium by weight), paper (containing more than 50% of paper by weight), and plastics (containing more than 80% polyolefin).

 

Coupled with this, international guidelines facilitated by the EMF’s New Plastics Economy and CEFLEX suggest avoiding PET for flexible packaging; instead promoting higher use of polyolefins (PP and PE), as with these materials it’s much easier to achieve scale and the recycled material has a wide spectrum of applications.

 

But without infrastructure to recycle what is produced, the problem remains. This is why Amcor’s 2025 sustainability commitment, and those of our largest customers and other companies in the value chain, also include driving up recycling rates, worldwide – and then increasing our use of post-consumer recycled content (PCR).

 

There’s a lot of work to do to develop the infrastructure needed to collect and recycle sufficient materials. By partnering with others and demonstrating that there is increasing demand for recycled materials, Amcor is part of a global collaboration to put in place the systems and infrastructure that is urgently needed to collect, sort and recycle flexible packaging.

Amcor is the core packaging partner of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy. In this initiative to develop a circular economy for plastics, we contribute our global packaging and supply chain expertise to help rethink and redesign the future of plastics. Together, we aim to create a continuous use-reuse cycle that captures value, generates efficient economics, and is better for the environment.


 

 
 

 

Where to from here?

 

We have the global capabilities and the determination to achieve more breakthroughs in packaging. While most of our packaging already meets criteria to be recyclable, we’re innovating to develop new materials so that it can all be recycled. And we’re designing packaging that makes separation and recycling easier.

 

We also achieve sustainability gains for our customers by reducing the weight of their packaging, and by using more post-consumer recycled resin – lowering demand on virgin resources.

 

You can follow our journey as we design for recycling and reuse, drive up use of recycled content and use our scale and expertise to help build the infrastructure the world needs: www.amcor.com/sustainability.

 

 

by Dr. Gerald Rebitzer 

Sustainability Director, Amcor Flexibles

 


 

by Andrea Della Torre 

Senior Director R&D, Amcor Flexibles