By Karen Hanna
The push for sustainability has added new wrinkles to packaging — inspiring products with thinner walls or more recycled content, and containers that can be refilled rather than thrown out.
The efforts pose extra challenges, but some manufacturers are seizing the opportunity to make a statement to customers that they are committed to conserving resources without compromising form or function. Among the manufacturers that have accepted the mission are processor Viva Healthcare Packaging (Canada) Ltd. and mold maker Hammonton Mold Co. Inc.
Sustainability advocates say the approach is better for everyone — including the manufacturers themselves.
“If you’re a processor for a mid-market brand owner, then you have an opportunity here to do what the brand owners probably can’t do very well, which is to understand the sustainability landscapes and act as a consultant,” said Bob Lilienfeld, founder of the Sustainable Packaging Research, Information, and Networking Group (SPRING), which looks at the environmental costs and benefits of packaging.
“The value you can provide is twofold: It has to do with the amount of energy you can reduce in your entirety of your system, and the amount of intelligence that you can provide to your customers.”
Taking the lead
The company’s flagship plant in Toronto is dedicated to matching the resolve of its customers, which have set goals for PCR use. Every year, it processes 100 million pounds of resin — mostly PP and PET — as it churns out 300 million tubes, as well as other containers, for health-care and beauty products. It operates 24/7 and has 200 of the company’s 300 injection molding lines — mainly Sumitomo and Netstal presses — as well as a Reifenhäuser CPP extruder, said Bruno Lebeault, the company’s marketing director for the Americas.
Concern for the environment is “super-important.” Among other things, it helps the company to land and retain workers — 500 of whom work in Toronto, he said.
“Sustainability is clearly very important for everybody, for the whole supply chain, and that starts with us as packaging suppliers to our
beauty-brands customers,” he said.
To help conserve energy, the company keeps many activities in-house and engages nearby markets when it comes to sourcing materials and selling its products. Customers can opt for a variety of services, including design and downstream assembly. Decoration offerings include label extrusion, label printing, in-mold labeling, metallizing and hot stamping.
“We see a big trend in our customers actually converting their offshore supply to local supply,” Lebeault said.
Better by design
For processors that don’t offer in-house design, sustainability efforts can get technical support from people like Ivan Domazet, co-owner and VP of Hammonton Mold, a Williamstown, N.J., shop that designs and manufactures blow molds for bottles.
Like Lebeault, Domazet is seeing demand for sustainability.
“Companies like Walmart have pushed for a while to use more post-consumer products in their packaging,” Domazet said.
The urgency to cut costs associated with plastic consumption — always an industry demand — now is accompanied by a desire to meet goals even further downstream, he said.
Hammonton Mold is answering the call, by helping customers optimize their tooling — primarily, molds for injection blow molding (IBM). The shop, which also makes molds for some injection stretch blow molds, serves customers that process a variety of resins, including PET, HDPE, PP and PC, for bottles ranging in size from 5 milliliters to 2 liters.
Sometimes, an old tool gets a new look.
“If it’s something that was spec’ed out back in the ’80s or ’90s and they just keep reusing old product drawings, maybe they were more generous with weights back then, [and] they don’t need to be today. Now, we can go back and reanalyze it,” he said.
The son of Hammonton Mold’s founder, Domazet said the mold shop continues to find ways to cut weight from bottles. In some cases, the shop uses a laser to engrave a dot pattern on mold cores, then cuts open the bottles the cores produce to see how the plastic was distributed. With insights from this process, the mold maker can work with its customer to optimize areas of the bottle or modify the tooling.
“We begin to look at how can we make a nice, new preform to give us the weight where we want, understanding that, because everything is connected, if you just modify one zone, it’s going to affect what’s above and below that in the parison cavity. So, you have to take everything into account, because it’s not just like individual soldiers going down individual ranks; they’re all going down interlocked, basically,” Domazet said.
Among his customers, Domazet said some molders that run both extrusion blow molding (EBM) and IBM lines sometimes use scrap from their IBM lines in their EBM lines, because IBM isn’t a suitable process for handling recycled materials.
Incorporating PCR wasn’t easy for Viva, either — at least at first.
One problem was adjusting to slower melt flow rates, which increased the costs of the process, Lebeault said. Over time, Viva has gotten accustomed to dealing with ever-growing volumes of PCR.
“We would put a small amount, like starting at 30 percent, and, as we got more used to it, we gradually increased to now 100 percent,” Lebeault said.
Of Viva’s strategies, none is more dramatic than its growing reliance on PCR.
Just six years ago, it relied on virgin resin, using hardly any PCR; since then, it has flipped those ratios. The company’s catalog boasts of the PCR percentages in its tubes, deodorant sticks and jars; numbers like 100 percent, 96 percent and 87 percent pop out.
Using PCR, the company has pulled down honors for its designs and sustainability efforts from such organizations as the World Packaging Organization and Tube Council. Its customers include Procter & Gamble and 3M Co.
“It used to be the case when only dark-gray PCR was available, and it was even smelly; back in the very early days of PCR, that’s what it was. But PCR has come a long way. Now, we can get clear PCR that looks just like virgin material, and without any odor, and with the same characteristics as virgin, so in terms of color matching, not a problem … just as well as with virgin material,” Lebeault said.
To satisfy growing demand for PCR, he said recyclers like Viva supplier PureCycle Technologies, Orlando, Fla. — which has a patented solvent-based technology to convert waste PP into virgin-like resin — will need to continue to expand.
“Hopefully, they’ll be able to supply the growing demand,” he said.
By focusing on PCR, companies like Viva are creating a market for the material. This focus on PCR also can help grow the supply of feedstock.
“That’s where design comes in. It’s so important that brands design their packaging so it’s recyclable, because point in fact is brand companies and packaging companies must understand that they are the creator of their own recycled manufacturing feedstock,” said Steve Alexander, president and CEO of the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR).
Viva has found other ways to make its containers more sustainable.
For example, to better facilitate recyclability, the company is moving away from using PET-
glycol. It also has modified some of its tubes so that tubes and caps now are made with the same material; in another optimization, some of the caps are manufactured as an attached part of the tube.
“That is setting the path for recyclability down the line, once the consumer has used and returned and it goes to the MRF [materials-recovery facility], and it doesn’t have to be separated,” Lebeault said.
Finally, Viva also is trying to cut down on the use of resin altogether, by switching over to refillable packages, in some cases. Offerings include deodorant sticks.
“You don’t throw away the whole package, so that results in over 50 percent plastic saving … and it’s PCR,” Lebeault said.
Accepting the challenge
Laura Martin, a retired plastics engineer and member of SPRING, believes manufacturers can realize collateral benefits from working toward brand owners’ and consumers’ goals for sustainability.
“It’s harder to make a product with 30 percent recycled resin vs. all virgin resin, so, what the processor can do is say that, ‘Yeah, I care enough to put in that extra effort.’ Because a lot of them won’t,” she said.
For Viva, doubling down on PCR is a primary path forward, Lebeault said.
He acknowledged efforts to make more-
sustainable packages carry a cost — but increasingly, consumers are willing to bear it.
“More consumers are looking at how sustainable the package is, and you see more and more the companies are communicating on, ‘This package is made with PCR.’ That shows that there is an expectation from the consumer who knows that, at the end of the day, [he or she] might have to pay a little more, but at least they’re doing something good for the planet,” Lebeault said. “And they’re ready to do it.”
Karen Hanna, senior staff reporter
About the Author
Karen Hanna
Senior Staff Reporter
Senior Staff Reporter Karen Hanna covers injection molding, molds and tooling, processors, workforce and other topics, and writes features including In Other Words and Problem Solved for Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing, Plastics Recycling and The Journal of Blow Molding. She has more than 15 years of experience in daily and magazine journalism.