What PET history can teach flexible packaging. Knowing the experiences of other plastic industries helps solve problems in others

It is known to everyone how comfortable and efficient flexible packaging for food that has replaced other non-plastic food packaging over the years.

For years it was praised the efficiency, comfort and cost-effectiveness of these packaging that gave, even in large retailers, a saving of time and space on the shelves.

After years of producing and using these products, we have realized that the millions of packages we produce and use around the world every day are not properly placed as they are not recyclable.

Because?

For the simple reason, that to ensure hygiene, excellent level of storage and durability, technicians of flexible packaging production have studied multi-layered and multi-product enclosures that cannot be recycled.

These millions of packages a day can only go to landfill or at worst pollute the environment.

Knowing history is always important in order not to repeat the mistakes of the past and to learn from it, this taught us at school at the first history lesson.

If we wanted to put this school teaching into practice, we would have to look around and see what the history of plastics can teach us about the problem of the recyclability of the products we produce.

In fact, the problem is not always to focus on how to recycle a waste that already exists but also to focus on finding industrial solutions that can produce a packaging that is in any case recyclable, at the lowest cost, at the lowest energy consumption and with the reduced waste.

History, as always, for those who want to watch, tells us that already the PET industry has come down this path finding solutions that would answer these questions.

Around 70s there was a cultural revolution in the field of soft drinks bottles, moving from glass to “plastic” packages, which were actually a mixture of various plastics, with aluminum screw caps whose advantage was definitely the lightness and the lower cost towards the glass, but on the other hand the total impossibility of recycling.

This today would have been a sure-time point of failure of the launch of a product but it was not at that time when we looked more at comfort and marginality on the packaging than on environmental problems.

In this general euphoria, however, a study pointed to acrylonitrile, a constituent element of the prevalence of the bottle, as a possible carcinogenic product, and the incineration of these bottles embedded in household waste produced toxic gases.

Coca Cola, in 1978, following the patent filed by DuPont, began to adopt PET as a raw material to produce its bottles but, it would not have been enough to change the material to definitively solve all the problems, upstream and downstream of the supply chain, if they had not even thought what to make of the packaging used by consumers.

The standardization of the use of PET in soft drinks led to the widespread diffusion of the product creating an important flow of material that could be recycled to create alternative products such as fabrics, fibers or ropes, contributing to the massive use of the waste material.

Today we are faced with the need to convert the production of flexible barrier packaging into recyclable elements that take into account the needs of food products but also the problem of disposal.

Processes have been initiated to produce flexible barrier packaging using the products of the polyolefine family, but without a global industrial conversion of packaging, the waste problem cannot be solved.

The recycling industry is making great efforts to increase the amount of products to be recycled but there are technical limits that do not allow cost-effective solutions.

These can be taken upstream by the production industry which has to put on the market only totally recyclable products.

The history of PET may be taught to be something.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.