A group of packaging professionals gathered in a virtual room on Wednesday to thrash out the problems and hurdles that stand in the way of realising a closed loop, circular economy for packaging materials.
The conversation, held as part of the AIP Australasian Packaging Conference 2020, covered many aspects of the circular economy, from design and materials to economics and consumer awareness.
Amcor Flexibles director, safety, quality, and sustainability Richard Smith zeroed in on soft plastics. His presentation was titled No Time to Waste, “because that’s exactly where we are right now; we have no time to waste”, he said.
“Soft plastics have been extraordinarily successful over the past 20-odd years, and they’ve also got significant environmental benefits. Flexible packaging offers the ability to substantially reduce the amount of plastics we use,” he said.
“That efficiency is one of the paradoxes in flexible packaging. It’s lightweight, has good barrier qualities, it is low cost, and it has a low carbon footprint. Its success has created a challenge in that, at the end of its life, there is little mass, and [therefore] it has low value.”
Smith said the solution to the circularity problem has several dimensions, including the packaging itself, the waste-collection infrastructure, consumer behaviour, and the recycling infrastructure itself.
He mentioned Amcor’s involvement in the Holy Grail project in Europe, which aims to ensure a purer recycling stream using digital watermarks on packaging.
Smith also said, for soft plastics, mechanical recycling is not going to be able to close the loop on its own, the industry must turn to chemical recycling.
“This is the way where we can close the loop on soft plastics,” he said.
“We need to consider that soft plastics are a very large portion of the plastics we use in Australia now, which is similar to other economies.”
And finally, Smith spoke about the importance of targets in encouraging investment in the circular economy.
“There is a strong future for us with the technology available; it’s just a matter of a concerted effort across the supply chain, and that’s where the [2025 National Packaging] targets will come into play,” he said.
Detmold Group general manager Tom Lunn turned the focus to fibre-based packaging in the circular economy. He said a major issue is that Australia is a small market and it is difficult to find the scale necessary for changes.
“You really nedd to be clever and find some end markets [for recycled materials],” he said.
“Those end markets drive through to packaging design, and the designers have to understand the consumer and the end-market motivators. We can’t operate alone anymore. You need partnerships and need to find willing partners who are moving in the same direction as you.”
Next, Nespresso Australia and Oceania technical quality manager Marta Fernandes spoke about her company's work with their aluminium coffee pods. She said worldwide they had been working with local recycling outfits to find solutions to recycle the pods efficiently.
“Eighty per cent of the aluminium in our pods is recycled,” she said. “We have also announced that we are committed to being carbon-neutral by 2022 – not only reducing the carbon in our supply chain, but also through insetting and offsetting, mainly in the countries of origin for our coffee.
“It is important to us that we are able to join forces with others, find local solutions for end-use materials.”
Sleever International Australasian representative Olivier Clement said his company, which focuses on shrink sleeves, has been innovating ways to make their products more sustainable.
“We can support brands towards their ecological transition with no compromise on the sensorial identity of their products because, at the end of the day, everyone needs to sell,” he said.
Clement also spoke about carbon footprint optimisation, which he said can be obtained through reducing the thickness of the materials and other methods.
“We have also developed our next-generation equipment to reduce water and energy usage with higher performance,” he said.
“I sometimes visit plants with old equipment and the steam tunnels look like Niagra Falls. Our look like a Swedish sauna, with almost dry steam.”
