Sustainability is becoming increasingly important. Together with more than 100 companies, the Oerlemans Packaging Group has signed the Plastic Pact. One of the objectives is that by 2025 all packaging must be 100% recyclable. Although plastic waste is already collected separately on a large scale, far from all plastic is also reusable and recyclable.

Different materials

Gert-Jan van Baardwijk, Commercial Director of Flexpak, subsidiary of OPACKGROUP: ‘Many of today’s stand-up pouches or stand-up pouches still consist of different materials. Sometimes a combination of paper on plastic, but often they are laminates, composed of PET, OPH/OPP combined with PE.’

Van Baardwijk continues: “Those bags work very well, but those plastics are not separable after use, so those existing containers cannot be recycled properly. Our new stand-up pouch consists of 100% recyclable PE (barrier) laminates. And it is fully processable on all machines that currently process non-recyclable quality, both horizontally and vertically.

Properties

Oerlemans’ new PE laminates have good sealing properties, are hygienic, suitable for piece sales, protect against drying out and can be made clear transparent for optimal product visibility.

It is suitable for packaging products such as pre-baked bread, shrimp or mussels, satay sticks, peeled potatoes, fresh meat, cheese blocks, pancakes, frozen foods or products with secondary packaging (candies with wrapped around paper).

Most importantly, we are going to optimize the supply chain for design for recycling, while food packaging should provide that protection.

Optimizing the chain

Van Baardwijk: “Composite materials were once developed to achieve good seal quality, or better clarity, or better barrier properties. And still a lot of packaging is made of composite materials. The most important thing is that we are going to optimize the chain for design for recycling, while food packaging has to provide that protection against the influences of light and air. That’s the challenge. With our new stand-up pouches, we have now succeeded in doing that using only polyethylene (PE).’

‘The new pouches can be provided with a CurvCode, which allows recycling machines to detect that the material is PE. In that sense, the stand-up pouch is completely ready for the future.’