Manufacturers Go Green with Product Packaging Innovations

More and more manufacturers of consumer goods are choosing to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Their effort aims to lighten the impact of packaging on the environment as well as boost the corporate bottom line by cutting costs for materials and transportation. Currently their packaging options include using renewable raw materials, packaging with recycled content, and lighter packaging. Food-based, bio-plastics made from the likes of sugar cane are also satisfying the appetites of some manufacturers.

• Coca-Cola introduced a new packaging material made partly from plants to bottle its sodas and water in early 2010. The container boasts the same weight, feel, and function as its former plastic trappings. Dubbed a “plantbottle,” it comprises 70% petroleum-based and 30% sugar-cane-based materials.

  
  

• Rival PepsiCo has announced its own green PET bottle, derived from 100% plant-based, renewable resources. It is set to debut in 2012. The company in 2009 brought to market a compostable bag made from plants for Frito-Lay SunChips snacks.

  
  

• Brazil-based Braskem is one of the pioneers of the bio-based plastics material, which translates sugar cane to ethanol and from ethanol to ethylene. Its customers for the green “plastic” include US consumer goods companies Procter and Gamble and Johnson and Johnson, Japanese cosmetics firm Shiseido, Japan-based automaker Toyota, and Swiss packaging group Tetra Laval.

  
  

• Bio-based materials might be good, but they are costly. Sonoco, one of two U.S. packaging companies listed on the 2010 Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (the other is MeadWestvaco) continues to spearhead research on its economic feasibility.

Big bottled-water producers have responded to the environmental backlash against plastic water bottles by tapping recycled plastic, or RPET (recycled polyethylene terephthalate). RPET is made from plastic that was previously used as packaging, then recycled and processed to create new bottles.

• Danone‘s redesigned its 1.5-liter Evian bottle is made of up to 50% RPET. The group’s Canada-based Naya Spring Water claims to be the first bottled spring water company in the world to use 100% recycled plastic in its bottles.

  
  

• Eldorado Artesian Springs marks the first US bottled spring water company to use 100% recycled plastic in its bottles. By using RPET instead of virgin plastic, Eldorado reportedly reduces the energy required to produce its bottles by 77%, and greenhouse emissions by 58%.

The ring for sustainable lightweight boxing is a crowded one. A few of the contenders:

• DuPont has developed a lineup of Dupont Surlyn packaging resins. The material enables bottle producers to reduce film thickness, weight, and cost, while maintaining or upgrading packaging performance, such as seal integrity and perforation resistance.

  
  

• Nestle in 2011 plans to capitalize on the evolving thin technology by unveiling a new, lighter version of its Eco-Shape bottle. In 2010 it reduced the height of its packs of Milo chocolate drink, saving more than 14 tons of plastic packaging a year.

  
  

• Plastipak Holdings is rolling out a new industrial process to bottle juice and water in the US. Its Plastipak Packaging subsidiary is the exclusive global licensee for Thermoshape, an alternative to conventional aseptic or “hot-fill” bottling that uses about 30% less material than traditional packaging. The company is a supplier of blow-molded plastic bottles to PepsiCo, and a vendor to Procter and Gamble and Kraft Foods.

  
  

• Amcor Rigid Plastics, the US-based rigid plastics division of the Australian global packaging giant Amcor Ltd., has offered its lightweight PowerFlex bottle in the U.S. market since 2007. The patented bottle improves on hot-fill technologies as well as touts shelf appeal with a glass-like appearance. PowerFlex is used for Coca Cola’s Fuze Beverage energy drinks. Amcor has also developed a container that is 80% lighter than glass and has a higher thermal stability than PET for Libby-brand sliced fruit sold by Seneca Foods.

Sylvia Lambert is an editor at Hoover's.