Leonie Knox-Peeble Speaks About Plastic Packaging

By Alessandra Lacaita,

Plastic has grown significantly as a packaging material over the last decade. Is it still increasing its market share? Where do you identify further opportunities for greater use of plastic packaging?

With a turnover of €40 billion (2009), plastic packaging is market leader and represents nearly 40% of the total packaging market turnover. Between now and 2016, market share is forecasted to continue to grow in both the flexible and rigid packaging sectors, with the food sector being the biggest end-use sector with around 17 million tonnes forecasted for 2016 globally.

Part of the rising consumption is offset by light-weighting in rigid articles and reducing film thickness, basically doing more with less and becoming more resource efficient. In addition, the average plastic packaging weight has been reduced by 28% over the last ten years without compromising either strength or durability.

Opportunities for greater use of plastic packaging are clear in the food sector, and more specifically, for packing fruit and vegetables. Indeed, according to the European Commission, 90 mio tonnes of food are wasted each year in the EU, and if we look at Germany, for example, the largest potential for avoiding household food waste lies with vegetables (which constitute 26% of avoidable food waste) and fruit (18%).

Some may question whether more packaging is the way forward when it comes to making Europe more resource efficient; but the figures are clear: the resources required to produce food outweigh by far those needed to manufacture the packaging – and saving food should not only be among our priorities from an environmental point of view, but from an ethical one as well.
Where we do see that more effort is required is at the end-of-life: no packaging, be it plastic or other, should end up in landfills.

To see the full article from PackagingEurope, click here.

New Plastic Packaging That Removes Emissions

By BusinessGreen,

A U.K. company claims to have produced a new type of plastic packaging that not only is 100 percent recyclable, but also actively removes CO2 emissions from the atmosphere.

The new Polyair material developed by Polythene U.K. is made from sugar cane and uses photosynthesis to capture CO2 emissions and release oxygen. The company claims that for every ton of the product manufactured, 2.5 tons of CO2 will be removed.

James Woollard, managing director at Polythene U.K., said Polyair could be used in a range of products, including bags, covers, tubes, films, wraps and stretch film, and would reduce the amount of polythene waste these products generate.

“Using a bio-based material, such as Polyair, at a percentage of 60 percent in film reduces the CO2 emissions to zero even when you take into consideration the energy used for manufacturing and shipping,” he added in a statement. “Put simply, Polyair is truly the greenest material we know of.”

To see the full article from GreenBiz, click here.

Nestle Reducing Packaging

Reducing Packaging By Charlotte Eyre,

Swiss giant Nestle SA reduced the weight of its packaging by 601,147 tons over the 1991-2010 period. Out of this total saving, 34 percent was plastics and laminates.

Philippe Roulet, head of global packaging materials and training, said the use of plastics and laminates has gone down partly because of changes to water bottles. He was speaking at the Renewable Plastics conference in Amsterdam this week.

The bottle for Ozarka, a bottled water brand sold in the US, is now made with only 9.3g of resin, he said, showing a slide which demonstrated that bottles for carbonated drinks were sometimes made with more than 20g of materials.

Roulet says use of materials is not the only thing to consider in terms of making the food supply chain more sustainable.

He said Nestle has a holistic approach. To achieve this, it uses the packaging eco-design tool PIQET (Packaging Impact Quick Evaluation Tool). PIQET looks at all areas of the supply chain, comparing the environmental impact of all areas of production.

To see the full article from PlasticsNews, click here.