Best In Packaging

This month we start again our series of new packaging developments. An ingenious packaging format for artisan square sandwiches, Salanova lettuce to grow in your own kitchen, a paperboard handgrenade holding a boxer short, nostalgic paperboard baskets for fruit and vegetables and from Singapore a Rice Dumpling Box made from nostalgic unbleached kraft.

Tri-Star’s Artisan Square Sandwiches
Tri-Star launched a new range of packaging for ‘rustic’ sandwiches – the hand-made, square-cut bloomer-style of sandwich that is currently all the rage in delis and discerning retailers up and down the UK.

The new Artisan range comprises two innovative pack designs – the ‘Bloomer U’ and the ‘Bloomer 2’.  The Artisan Bloomer U is a flat structure with sides that click upwards to form a U-shape.  This next-generation pack can be flow‐wrapped, wrapped with poly-sheet or simply bagged. It protects the product while in transit and on display and ensures it is highly visible at all times.

The design of the Artisan Bloomer U also helps guarantee that the sandwich stays in great shape and that it is easy to pick up and put down, making it ideal for eating at the office desk or grazing in the park.

The Artisan Bloomer 2, meanwhile, is an off-the shelf pack boasting two cavities that are the perfect shape and size for square-cut sandwiches.  The Artisan Bloomer 2 is designed to be bagged but can also be flow‐wrapped.

Created by Anson, a UK packaging manufacturer, the Artisan range will be distributed exclusively by food packaging supplier Tri-Star. The packaging is made of rPET (recycled PET), a sustainable, recyclable material recognised as a BRC food grade material.

Salanova lettuce hits the market in a pot
The Dutch potted plant grower Bunnik Plants has developed a new concept with Salanova lettuce. This concept, Salafresh, was presented at the largest ornamental and flower exhibition in Europe, the IPM Essen in Germany.

The product is sold with a special packaging concept ‘your own salad garden in the kitchen’.
With its numerous, smaller leaves and compact size, Salanova is the perfect lettuce type for this purpose. The consumer has a fun product in the kitchen and it stays fresh for a long time.

The packaging has a QR code that consumers can scan with a smart phone. They will be directed automatically to Lovemysalad.com where they can find and share salad inspiration, recipes and all kinds of other ‘fresh fun’.

The Bazingaa Boxer Hand Bombs
A stylistic package for a pair of boxer shorts used as sport wear or underpants is made from corrugated paper. The package from the God Speed Co. Ltd. from Thailand, is in the form of a rocket capsule depicting on active lifestyle. The capsule can be detached easily from its holder, and the cap removed conveniently to take out the product.

The packaging, 11x6x20 cm, is made from recyclable single wall corrugated board with mono-colour printing.

Baskets and bowls for fruit and vegetables
The carrying baskets and bowls in chip basket design are an own development of the German packaging manufacturer Karl Knauer KG. The challenge was to add moisture protection to the inside, achieve the necessary stability and to meet the requirements for direct contact with food.

The paperboard baskets and bowls for fruit and vegetables are certainly worthy of distinction under the aspect of sustainability. They can replace both plastic containers and woodchip baskets on the fruit and vegetable shelves. They are made of paperboard which has been demonstrably approved for direct contact with food, it also being possible to dispose of it in the recycling loop for waste paper.

Their foldable property reduces the logistical expenditure for the baskets, low-migration inks and the refinements of the inside with a special barrier varnish crown the top quality of the product for everything that is fresh and is to stay that way.
A woven look and surfaces which can easily be printed on, provide manufacturers with all the chances of positioning themselves as a sender of traditionally high-quality original products.

Rice Dumpling Box
The rice dumpling box is a creation to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival. The Dragon Boat Festival, otherwise also known as the Rice Dumpling Festival or the Duanwu Jie falls on the 5th day of the 5th month in the Chinese Lunar calendar.
It is shaped just like its content, a rice dumpling, complete with a string. To add to the nostalgia feel, the package is printed on uncoated kraft that brings back memories of the paper bags that were a common sight years ago by simulating the look of the good old brown paper bags.

To instill the value of conserving traditions, the graphics design of the box shows activities relating to the festival such as dragon boat racing and the making of rice dumplings. The box is able to pack six small rice dumplings.
This packaging, designed by Starlite Printers (Far East) Pte Ltd in Singapore, is made with solid unbleached sulphate board. The printing is done on the uncoated kraft surface to give the box a nostalgic look, the colour scheme used is limited with black as the dominating colour to simulate the look of paper bags used commonly in the seventies and eighties. The package is fastened with a string just like a rice dumpling. When the restraining string is drawn, the package closes into its unique shape. The string also serves as a handle. By releasing the string and stretching the side of the packaging, its content can be accessed freely.

As the packaging is not enclosed fully, it allows air exchange which is important to maintain freshness of the rice dumpling. The inner surface of the box is laminated with a layer of OPP film to prevent the seepage of oil from the rice dumpling into the board allowing the packaging to maintain its clean look.

More to come.

To my regular readers it is well-known that I object strongly any use of so-called biodegradable or compostable packaging material. First of all no packaging material biodegrades in a landfill by lack of oxygen and the far too few industrial composting facilities often refuse to take packaging material into their processes. Furthermore, let’s face it, there is no such thing as a pure one component in packaging material. There always are coatings or additives and often more than one layer of different materials.

In my vision, there is only one answer to our increasing mountain of post-consumer packaging material. Technology has to help us to develop recycling systems, preferably the ones which recycle “cradle-to-cradle”. And more and more of these systems are coming to age, while others are under development to fill the non-covered spaces.
Today I want to discuss the, still by many people believed to be unrecyclable, and as such undesirable, packages composed with an aluminium element.

There seems to be some confusion and misconception about recycling of packages which hold elements of aluminium. In other words the pouches made from a combination of plastic/aluminium or the famous beverage cartons made from paperboard /aluminium/plastic.
It takes approximately 95% less energy to produce secondary aluminium, via recycling operations, than is otherwise consumed when producing primary aluminium from bauxite. This is one of the main reasons why recovering the aluminium component from packaging material is so important and justifies the development of sophisticated recycling systems.

Let’s start with a look at the recycling of flexible pouches, a packaging format with an immense growing potential. Pouches have many benefits such as light-weighting, leading to savings in material and transport costs, but due to the (food) content they often have an aluminium layer, and consequently are said not to be recyclable. It is obvious that brand owners are keen to see this changed, as they want to be able to put a ‘recyclable logo’ on the packaging to reinforce their sustainability credentials.

The above claim about the non-recyclability of flexible pouches with an aluminium component is correct. However recent developments might bring this condition to an end.

The Enval recycling process
Enval, a UK-based company, a spin off from the University of Cambridge, is seeking to commercialise its patented know-how that it said offers a genuine recycling route for plastic/aluminium laminate packaging that has, to date, been unrecyclable.

With recent investments secured from a syndicate of investors including Cambridge Enterprise, Cambridge Capital Group and Cambridge Angels and the backing from industrial partners, like Kraft Foods and Nestlé, Enval expects to bring its first commercial plant into service towards the middle of this year.

The feedstock would come initially from industrial waste generated throughout the packaging supply chain, from sources as varied as web laminate makers, packaging converters and even food manufacturers. The company will later look to source post-consumer waste.

The recloseable stand-up retort pouch for Sprout Organic Baby Food has a multi-layer structure (PET/foil/OPA/PP). The pouches can't be recycled, so Sprout partnered with TerraCycle to collect used pouches to keep them out of the landfill and to upcycle into other consumer products, like tote bags.

Enval’s patented technology offers a genuine recycling route for plastic/aluminium laminate packaging. The technology separates the material into its constituent components, producing clean 100% aluminium ready for introduction into the secondary aluminium supply chain and hydrocarbons that can be used as fuel or chemical feedstock.

The Enval process is based on a process called microwave induced pyrolysis which allows the waste to be treated in the absence of oxygen. As opposed to incineration, pyrolysis takes place without the combustion of the material (in this case the waste) avoiding the production of green-house gases or toxic emissions. Furthermore, since the Enval process uses microwave energy as the source of heat, by using renewable or green electricity, the process can be made carbon neutral.

Recycling beverage cartons
It certainly is true that much of the paper used in beverage cartons (Tetra Pak, SIG Combibloc, Elopak etc.) is virgin fibre and is recovered at paper mills through a de-pulping process. Worldwide there are some hundred paper mills which recycle post-consumer beverage cartons, recovering the paper part of the cartons. The paper mill that recycles the most cartons is the German Papierfabrik Niederauer Mühle GmbH, recycling about 100,000 tonnes of cartons every year – the equivalent of 500 million beverage cartons.

775% paper component, 25% aluminium/plastic component

However, this leaves a plastic/aluminium residue that isn’t and can’t be processed by the said paper mill and as such is currently disposed of to landfill or incinerated. But this is unnecessary and a waste of good quality prime aluminium.

I suspect that from this practice comes the general believe that beverage cartons can’t be recycled. Furthermore municipalities with a selective waste collection in place, forbid their inhabitants to put the beverage cartons on the same heap as paperboard, using the argument of non-recyclable.
But it has to be said we do recycle beverage cartons already for years.

In 2009 I wrote about small scale recycling of post-consumer beverage cartons and the first sophisticated recycling plant for Tetra Paks in Piracicaba / Brazil, which comes very close to the ‘cradle-to-cradle’ principal. The joint-venture between Alcoa Aluminio, Tetra Pak Brasil, Klabin and TSL Ambiental, uses ground-breaking plasma technology, which enables the total separation of aluminium and plastic components from the cartons. The plasma process allows for the return of all three components of the cartons to the productive chain as raw material. It’s not a perfect closed loop or cradle-to-cradle recycling as these three recycled components are not re-used in new Tetra Paks.

And the technology evolves. End of last year Stora Enso, inaugurated its new facility in Barcelona, being the first to employ technology called pyrolysis that enables the full recovery of plastics and aluminium used in beverage cartons.
The plastic/aluminium laminate from recovered beverage cartons is separated by the new processing technology. This means both fibre and aluminium can be fully reused and the plastic to utilised to generate energy in the mill. The recovered fibre is used for the production of white lined chipboard at the site.

The pyrolysis process, refined in partnership with Alucha Recycling Technologies, begins with the polylaminate (plastic/aluminium mixture) that has been separated from the beverage carton paper in a pulping chamber that works much like a washing machine.
This residue is dried and broken down into small pieces before being put through the pyrolysis process that involves exposing the material to 400ºC of heat in an oxygen free chamber.
The heat causes the plastic to evaporate while the aluminium stays where it is. The evaporated gas can be used to generate electricity, while the aluminium remains un-oxidised and can be recycled and re-melted without problems to be used to make new aluminium products.

The distinguishing features of the new system are that unlike a previous technology used at the plant of Corenso Varkaus in Finland that failed for economic reasons, the new pyrolysis operates at a lower temperature (400ºC versus nearly 800ºC) and operates in a zero oxygen chamber.
The chamber at Corenso Varkaus had 10-15% oxygen and this created aluminium oxide which is worth much less than pure aluminium.

The process generates valuable aluminium and enough power, via the evaporated plastic, to provide for 10% of the energy requirements at the Barcelona paper mill. And lower temperatures mean this can be achieved with a lower energy bill.

Dr. Carlos Ludlow-Palafox

With the help and technical assistance of Tetra Pak, Stora Enso began operating the pyrolysis process this summer after having already run a pilot with an annual capacity of 1,000 tonnes of beverage carton. The newly installed machinery will allow Stora Enso to move up to industrial scale production this year, with a capacity to process 30,000 tonnes of used beverage cartons annually.

Stora Enso states that the Barcelona mill now receives used milk and juice cartons from Spain, France, Portugal and the UK.

We have seen that in both processes, The Enval technology for flexible pouches and the Stora Enso plant in Barcelona for beverage cartons, pyrolysis lies at the heart of both processes. Now there is one interesting thing as at the heart of both companies, Enval in the UK and Alucha in Barcelona, which refined the technology for Stora Enso, sits Dr. Carlos Ludlow-Palafox, the technologist responsible for the pyrolysis technology. Carlos Ludlow-Palafox graduated with a degree in Chemical Engineering from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City in 1996. He gained a PhD with distinction in pyrolysis technology from the Cambridge University, where he, as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate, in conjunction with Professor Howard Chase, conducted research into the microwave pyrolysis of plastics and plastic-containing wastes in batch systems. He is connected to both up-starts.

Concluding we can say that the aluminium component in all different packages. from pouches to cartons, can now be recuperated and used as new in the next generation of packages. Now it is up to the Councils to implement a selective collecting system for post-consumer pouches and cartons.