One of the toughest sustainability dilemmas for years has been soft plastics, piling up in warehouses around Australia. Amcor says it has a solution. Sylvia Ramsey
Jul 9, 2024
Some of the most difficult problems in sustainability are being tackled head on by Australian manufacturing and consumer goods innovators.
Issues as pressing as e-waste, textile industry pollution, yellow bin contamination, and huge fields of single-use synthetic turf are being addressed by the 2024 Sustainability Leaders in this category.
Amcor Flexibles Asia Pacific is manufacturing a new recyclable, heat-resistant film that can be used in food packaging.
For decades, one of the toughest sustainability dilemmas has been soft plastics.
Notoriously hard to recycle, they are a significant contributor to landfill and CO₂ emissions. The crisis worsened in late 2022 with the collapse of the REDcycle plastic recycling program, amid revelations that hundreds of millions of bags dropped off at supermarkets were being stockpiled in warehouses around the country.
Amcor Flexibles Asia Pacific appears to have cracked the soft plastic recycling code with its AmPrima innovation, which won the Manufacturing and Consumer Goods category this year.
A new recyclable, heat-resistant film, AmPrima is taking the guilt out of packaged consumables such as cream cheese, coffee, snacks and baked goods. The innovation is expected to suck 300,000 kilograms of non-recyclable packaging from the consumer goods supply chain in Australia and New Zealand this year.
Painstakingly engineered to replace non-recyclable nylon and polyethylene terephthalate (PET), it has a simpler mono-polyethylene structure. This is key as it allows global consumer goods giants such as Unilever to eliminate the hard-to-recycle elements from pouches, shrink wrap, film, bakery bags, wipes packaging, trays and cups.
Amcor Flexibles sustainability director Richard Smith explains that long-used PET film makes the whole package unrecyclable when mixed with other materials in multi-material packaging.
“Mechanical recycling needs materials that are compatible with each other and when you have things like PET and nylon and other films, they’re just not compatible,” Smith says.
“Then, depending on how much is in there, all you can do is throw it into landfill, or you might use it in down-cycled applications. But that’s not really the circular economy when you’re doing that.
“We knew that we had to eliminate PET, but there are lots of technicalities why it’s not an easy task.”
His team focused on “how to sort of unpick what we’ve done in the past and use materials that are much easier to recycle, like polyethylene and polypropylene, and get the functional characteristics of the film that it is going to replace.”
AmPrima’s proprietary techniques deliver heat resistance, stiffness, and the run speeds and the quality demanded by top consumer goods brands, matching unrecyclable alternatives.
“The AmPrima range is unique,” says Smith. “It enables us to have all the physical properties of PET films in many ways – glossiness and the ability to print, heat resistance, a whole raft of technical requirements – but able to be recycled, which is what everyone wants.”
Amcor’s AmPrima recyclable packaging is expected to suck 300,000 kilograms of non-recyclable packaging from the consumer goods supply chain this year. Dairy giant Fonterra is leading the way with the largest commercialisation of AmPrima globally, cutting more than 72,000 kilograms of non-recyclable plastic with new packaging for its cream cheese blocks.
It’s a challenging “hot-fill” product, entering the packaging at a temperature that can wrinkle some wraps, or leak and cause food wastage. AmPrima stands up admirably to these challenges, meeting Fonterra’s needs while crucially beating PET-based film competitors with its recyclable credentials.
“We’ve been able to launch it with them as our primary partner in the region, and now we’re expanding it beyond to all of our customers,” Smith says.
PET films are used in many different applications on the supermarket shelf, and Amcor says it has long been the “workhorse of the industry”.
“I’m not overplaying it to say it’s quite transformational to move a lot of what’s on the shelf today away from a non-recycled-ready structure to a recyclable structure. We take it very seriously globally,” Smith, a chemical engineer, says.
Amcor’s new recyclable plastic is being used in a range of consumer products. Amcor already has a local pipeline of more than $5 million for the product, though Smith says the real game change goes well beyond sales growth, impacting the broader value chain. “It is a much bigger play than that. What this does for the Australian economy is significant,” he says.
Recyclers such as PACT, and Amcor itself with partner Licella Holdings, have invested heavily to build large plastic recycling plants in Australia, and Smith says such facilities cannot operate effectively “if they are bringing in lots of non-recyclable packaging”.
“With this innovation of AmPrima, we are enabling much more flexible soft plastics that are put on market to be of value. If you put your hand up to collect soft plastics, every kilo that you collect you want to be valuable, you want to be able to sort it and on-sell it to somebody.
“So this change to me, being immersed in the industry, is actually transformational. I’m very excited about the economic benefits.”
AMC Price at posting:
$14.20 Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
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