Packaging sustainability is achieved when organizations across the entire value chain align their goals with overarching initiatives.
Partnerships across the supply chain—and with trade organizations who share similar sustainability values—deliver bio-renewability, compostability and recyclability that will help the packaging industry move toward reducing waste and becoming a circular economy.
The circular economy is a critical new economic paradigm that aims to minimize pollution and waste, extend product lifecycles, and enable broad sharing of physical and natural assets. It pushes a competitive economy that creates green jobs and keeps resource use within planetary boundaries.
Dynamics & Regulations
The plastic packaging industry has an inherent and very visible waste problem, which has been highlighted by prominent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. To address this issue and respond to the accumulation of waste in the environment, major brand owners have joined various regional plastics pacts around the world, including the US Plastics Pact, and made public commitments to, among other things, increase the rate of recycling and recycled material use in their packaging by 2025.
A recent report from The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development revealed that the amount of plastic waste generated each year has doubled during the last two decades, with about 40 percent of that coming from packaging. It’s projected to more than double again by 2040 if significant changes aren’t made.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) programs for packaging have expanded substantially globally, including in Canada and Latin America, and now US activities are also accelerating. The first two EPR bills in the US were signed into law in Maine and Oregon in 2021, creating momentum for a growing number of state and federal bills that are currently under consideration.
Single-use plastics are also a focus of legislation around the world to address the plastic waste problem. Packaging producers must redesign to avoid single-use plastics designations while also enhancing recyclability or reuse.
Globally, more than 90 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia, and Central and South America have single-use plastic legislation already in place. Europe’s Single-Use Plastics Directive, adopted in 2019, aims to tackle marine littering and plastic waste through a harmonized legislative framework across the EU.
On June 22, 2022, Canada published Single-Use Plastics Prohibition Regulations, designating six single-use plastic product types as toxic and banning them under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA) in a staggered timeline from 2022 to 2025. Regulations prohibit the manufacture, import, sale and eventually export of these six categories of single-use plastic items including ring carriers and straws.
In the US, there has been no national approach on single-use plastics to date. It is currently up to individual cities, counties and states to decide whether and how to regulate these potentially problematic plastics.
Despite this lack of alignment, regulators, legislators and consumers are focused on clarity and accuracy of environmental claims, including recyclability to reduce waste, and packaging producers must develop documentation to support environmental claims. At the same time, several US states and countries around the world are implementing or considering deposit refund systems, which will also increase collection and recycling rates.
The Federal Trade Commission in the US, which manages allowable environmental marketing claims, updated recent guidance on product certifications and seals of approval, renewable materials and energy sources, and carbon offset claims designed to avoid misleading and/or confusing environmental claims, especially those directed toward consumers.
Meanwhile, in California, an October 2021 law (SB 343) was signed, which clarifies what is considered recyclable and prohibits the misleading “chasing arrows” labeling for non-recyclables.
APR Updates
The Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR) recently published phase one of the “APR Global Design Catalog,” a comprehensive resource that provides access to the most current plastic packaging recyclability guidelines for countries and regions around the world.
In addition, the APR Design Guide for Plastics Recyclability remains the most comprehensive and current resource outlining the plastics recycling industry’s recommendations in today’s marketplace. Recent updates and improvements include new sortation, label design guidance and PE film protocols.
The APR is also engaged with peer organizations in other regions, for example, CEFLEX and RecyClass in Europe, to exchange on best practices, testing protocols and results, and evolving packaging recyclability guidelines.
5Rs: Sustainable Growth
Brands and their packaging converter partners are taking increasing steps to reduce their carbon footprints. Supplier partners, like Sun Chemical, are supporting the brand owner goals through innovative product technologies, while at the same time advancing internal sustainability programs. Sun Chemical organizes its sustainability initiatives with a “5R” framework.
The framework is a roadmap for existing and developing technology and product portfolios, as well as its sustainable operational activities. The 5Rs referenced are reuse, reduce, renew, recycle and redesign, all of which support a circular economy and reductions in carbon footprint. They can be applied from either an operational or product-oriented point of view.
Following the 5R approach to operations:
- Reuse can be about recovering energy from waste streams, including diverting those waste streams from less desirable disposal options, like landfills
- Reduce is about the various ways waste, energy use and emissions are reduced at facilities
- Renew refers to accessing new renewable sources of electrical and fuel energy
- Recycle is about capture and recovery of solvents or other valuable raw material streams
- Redesign considers alternate operational scenarios or technologies in place of conventional operations, for greater efficiency and performance
Examples could include use of automation, or optimization of manufacturing campaigns to minimize unsustainable downtimes, equipment cleanups and startup waste. Suppliers are challenging themselves to look for ways they can improve their internal processes by monitoring key metrics to understand and manage their environmental impact, actions that are aligned with many of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development goals.
Download Sun Chemical’s Sustainable Growth guide to learn about the 5Rs.
Innovation & Design
In terms of applications of the 5R concept for products, Sun Chemical considers the components of a package, such as the inks, coatings and adhesives, as they are the enablers of a sustainable package. In this scenario:
- Reuse refers to products that are designed to contain post-consumer recycled materials, or with protective coatings and resistant inks that offer the durability needed for reusable articles or packaging
- Reduce is about enabling overall packaging lightweighting, through protective and barrier coatings, and also barrier adhesives technologies
- Reduce can also be about minimizing or eliminating waste at converter facilities with printing technologies that avoid press startups and shutdowns
- Renew is about designing products with higher biorenewable content, which immediately translate into CO2 emissions reductions
- Recycle is about products that enable enhanced recyclability, including repulpability and compostability, of a range of packaging structures
- Redesign is about fundamental rethinking of packaging designs and printing processes
While a packaging substrate itself may be sustainable, the sustainability of the printed components contributes to the overall design, functional integrity and performance of the package. These components can determine whether a package ultimately is recyclable, compostable and/or biorenewable.
For example, in the plastic packaging market, developing ink technology that delivers all the required performance attributes on-press and then is removable without leaving ink residues or color in recycling processes and/or in the recovered material, is a significant technical challenge.
This challenge has been met through the SunSpectro SolvaWash FL and SolarFlex CRCL UV Flexo product lines—without requiring any adaptation to converter processes or adjustment of end-application requirements.
These washable ink technologies are a very promising new approach to enable circularity, allowing converters to address the demands of brand owners, while delivering an immediate and measurable impact for the plastic packaging market, to reduce waste, increase recycled material availability and minimize environmental footprints.
The inks are designed to be removed and separated from recoverable plastic substrates in today’s mechanical recycling processes, which improves recyclability of packaging and enables industry certifications that are important for brand owners. The wash-off technology is an enabler for higher-quality recycled plastics, to increase demand and value, as well as higher quantity, given that it allows some plastic components to be recovered rather than landfilled.
Sun Chemical’s recycle-friendly ink solutions like FTA Sustainability Excellence Award honoree, SolvaWash FL and SolarFlex CRCL product lines are drop-ins for today’s flexographic printing processes to enable more recyclable, sustainable plastic packaging. The inks do not require special primers and therefore do not add extra cost or weight.
Sun Chemical has also developed an Ink Troubleshooting Guide designed to solve issues specific to different printing markets. In flexographic printing, these challenges include ink adhesion, blocking/offset, ink smearing, weak print color and mottled print. Users can click through each challenge to review more specific problems and general solutions, allowing them to troubleshoot issues on their end.
The Ink Troubleshooting Guide is available in six languages and offered online.
Enabling Circularity
Committing to sustainability means prioritizing and enabling increased materials circularity. To allow this shift, the plastic packaging industry is focusing on making products that are easier to recycle or otherwise recover.
As the technology expands to various additional printed plastic packaging applications, the same sustainability benefits can be realized at multiple levels across the value chain.
Technological innovation is a result of the entire market and value chain, from retailers and brands, to suppliers, converters, recyclers, also NGOs and legislators, communicating openly, working together and being aligned toward achievement of sustainability goals.
About the Author
Dr. Juhasz presented a FLEXO Tech Talk on Nov. 1, carrying the same title as this article.
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