Recycling Flexible Packaging

Flexible film—and the packaging it helps create—often has less process and distribution waste than most rigid containers. The resulting greenhouse gas emissions are often favorable for flexible.

Aside from the measurable emissions and waste benefits that flexible packaging has, creating recycle-ready solutions will continue to drive our product development. Customers and the circular economy are primary areas of focus across our Total Packaging Solutions product offering and strategy, from bulk-size bag-in-box or small, retail-friendly spouted pouches.

Some key metrics and developments for recyclability that Scholle IPN has identified are:

• Engineer cap and film products to be as lightweight as possible so that recycling can be simple and low-impact from the start.
• Greater use of innovative materials and alternative (i.e. non-fossil fuel) feed-stocks for plastic production, where they are demonstrably more sustainable.
• Design plastic packaging with “single-piece” caps and fitments, that reduce the chance of having loose parts leak into the environment and increase the chance that the whole package will be recycled.

On our journey toward a sustainable future for packaging, we have developed exciting film technology to support recyclability of pouch and bag-in-box packaging formats.

Film is the critical component in recyclability.

We extrude, laminate, and deliver printed barrier film designed to meet your product specifications. Our wide range of solutions includes everything from one- to nine-layer films, as well as recyclable, mono-material structures.

While developing leading, recyclable film solutions, we’ve been able to create numerous opportunities for flexible packaging to provide serious environmental improvements:

• Surface Printing – Using solvent-free printing ink streamlines the printing process, saving resources.
• Solventless – Eliminating solvents from the lamination processes eliminates harmful emissions.
• Lightweight Structures – By using fewer base materials in our films, we can save raw materials throughout the supply chain.
• Lamination-Free – Films requiring no lamination use less energy and chemicals during production. The resulting structures are simpler, which aid in recyclability.
• Aluminum-Free – Barrier technology in plastics has progresses to a point where we no longer need to incorporate environmentally-costly metals in most film structures.

We work to continuously improve the sustainability of our film and fitment structures, with the ultimate goal of providing fully-recyclable packaging where local capabilities allow.

Depending on the film and fitment composition, there are a different options for recycling: mechanical or chemical.

Mechanical recycling* refers to operations that aim to recover plastics waste via mechanical processes (i.e. grinding, washing, separating, drying, re-granulating and compounding).

Chemical recycling+ breaks the polymers down into basic chemical building blocks for creating a versatile mix of new plastics, chemicals, fuels, and other products using heat or chemicals. Both options allow us to help you on your journey towards a more circular economy.

*Sustainable Packaging Coalition. (2020). Mechanical Recycling Options. Retrieved April 16, 2020, from https://sustainablepackaging.org/mechanical-recycling-options/

+American Chemistry Council. (2020). What is Advanced Recycling? Retrieved April 16, 2020, from https://plastics.americanchemistry.com/what-is-chemical-recycling/Differences between mechanical and chemical

As members of How2Recycle, we strive to engineer packaging that minimizes our impact on the environment. While source reduction is an important piece of the sustainability puzzle, we know that recyclability is too. To that end, we’re working to continue developing recycle-ready solutions, and get the How2Recycle label applied to as many of our packages as possible.

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