Plastic Packaging : Berry Bramlage wins 2021 German Packaging Award for Sustainability
Berry Bramlage was awarded the 2021 German Packaging Award in the category ‘Sustainability’.
The plastic manufacturer known for producing packaging solutions for sectors ranging from healthcare and engineering to personal and homecare won due to technical and design enhancements for two of its products.
The jury was partial to Berry’s Lip Care stick for its ability to effectively combine functionality with inherent sustainability. The new model utilises PP, which has a smaller ecological footprint than POM, which is generally used in similar applications. The stick, formerly consisting of four parts, has now been streamlined to form a lighter three-part model.
The producer’s popular Magic Star Light dispenser is also monomaterial-based, now that it has its metal spring has been replaced for a PP one.
Maintaining the user-friendly features of the original design that allowed for the controlled dosing and hygienic application of lotions, creams and gels, the offering now is also more sustainable due to its single plastic approach.
In 2022, 35,5 million tons of flexible plastic packaging will be produced. Research also shows that the market for monomaterials will be worth $70,9 billion.
Generally speaking, rigid plastics (used to fabricate laundry products or engine oil containers) are made from one type of plastic. Yet most food products are wrapped in flexible plastics, which consist of blended polymers. As the food industry places various demands on packaging such as durability, permeability and tensile strength, the multi-layer plastic approach for the likes of plastic pouches or wrappers, for instance, has become common. These composite plastics are harder to recycle, often leading to their incineration or their dumping on landfills.
Notwithstanding the current market conditions, the EU has pledged to only produce recyclable or reusable packaging by 2030.
One way to achieve this goal is by producing monomaterial single-use plastics. In this way, plastic waste processing capacity, and, incidentally, recycling rates can be improved by exclusive reliance on materials such as LDPE, PP, PE or PET as these represent the most common recycling streams.
In recent years, global companies such as Dow, Borealis, Exxon Mobil have started jumping on the monomaterial bandwagon. The all-PP pouch solution for dry foods made by Jindal Films in cooperation with Unilever and Mondi is a prominent example for this development.