Category: Health
Plastic packaging: Keeping it clean
With hygiene in the spotlight, why is plastic packaging the preferred medium within the retail and home environments? Due to its shatter resistant properties, plastic has the ability to reduce breakages and thereby lower the risk of contamination within the retail and home environments, and surrounding work surfaces, whilst also protecting the contents from moisture,…
Absolut Testing Paper-Based Bottle Caps
Pernod Ricard spirits brand Absolut is in the prototyping phase of packaging format testing with a press formed, paper-based beverage cap application. While Packaging World tends to feature commercialized, shelf-ready packaging applications, projects still percolating in the prototype stage sometimes catch our eye. We first got wind that Sweden’s Blue Ocean Closures’ (BOC) paper-based bottle cap was soon…
Kite Packaging launch large letter postal boxes
Slim corrugated boxes offer rigid protection to small items while fitting into the Royal Mail’s PiP Large Letter specification. This minimises and regulates postal costs, enabling a business to maximise their overall profits. Kite offer their brown large letter boxes in five different sizes to cater toward everything from gift cards and small jewellery items…
Flexible Packaging at a Critical Crossroads in Sustainability
The straight and narrow road leads flexibles to an uncertain future and less sustainable packaging. The longer route expands the role of flexibles in preventing food waste. The flexible packaging industry is once again at a critical crossroads. Insights gained from talking shop at ReFED and the Global Pouch Forum defined for me the critical nature of this crossroad.…
High-Barrier Material Takes Paper Packaging to a New Level
Amcor has developed an environmentally friendly paper packaging material that protects food from oxygen and moisture — and runs well on with existing packaging lines. Amcor is expanding packagers’ options for sustainable flexible materials with the launch of LifeSpan Performance Paper in Europe. The recyclable, high-barrier material was developed for food packaging and is the first…
Innovative heat-seal grape punnet optimises value chain
With the goal of reducing the post-harvest cooling period and eliminating moisture and condensation that results in product spoilage, Mpact Versapak, a division of the Mpact Group, recently redesigned its 100% post-consumer rPET grape punnet to optimise the entire value chain. The fruit industry is vitally important to South Africa as a foreign currency earner…
‘We need composting, but compostable packaging is still single-use’
Compostable packaging is popularly seen as an answer to plastic pollution, but while it has a role to play in a circular economy, it is not a silver bullet. Any time a piece of packaging is used once – no matter how it is disposed of – it is single-use. Preventing waste in the first…
Can advanced recycling support flexible packaging’s quest for circularity?
Sreeparna Das spoke to Bob Powell, CEO of Brightmark, to understand the role advanced recycling – also known as chemical recycling – can play in supporting the demands of the flexible packaging sector, the key growth areas, and the existing challenges to scaling up advanced recycling. As demand for more recycled content, commitment to meet environmental…
Scientists develop starch-based biopolymer coating with antimicrobial properties for food packaging
Scientists at Rutgers University, New Jersey, have developed a starch-based, degradable biopolymer coating with naturally occurring antimicrobial ingredients, which can reportedly be sprayed onto food to protect against contamination, spoilage, and transportation damage. Conducted in collaboration with scientists at Harvard University and funded by the Harvard-Nanyang Technological University/Singapore Sustainable Nanotechnology Initiative, the Rutgers research on the bio-based,…
UPM launches fibre-based high-barrier packaging solution
UPM Speciality Papers has unveiled UPM Solide Lucent, a recyclable speciality kraft paper that the company says can be used as a coating base or for single-packs, bags, and wraps, with higher basis weights offered for a range of properties and applications. According to UPM, UPM Solide Lucent is a kraft paper that is repulpable and…
