To understand the future of flexible food packaging, you first must understand the history. No one knows that better than Tom Dunn, a 40-year veteran of the packaging industry who has developed flexible packaging products, processes, and platforms. Now, the managing director of Flexpacknology, he consults with manufacturers, material suppliers, and machine builders on how to create a new economy for flexible food packaging and recycling. Here, Dunn discusses the need for both packaging OEMs and food manufacturers to take more responsibility in producing food-safe recycled materials.
What is the current state of flexible food packaging?
Tom Dunn: It is unique having this disconnect with the products that the CPG/food companies make between consumables, packaging materials, and capital assets that fill packaging materials in some way shape or form.
My background has been in designing the materials for the different kinds of products that will be packaged on the packaging machinery. A lot of flexible packaging, particularly the bags that are vertically filled, are formed on the packaging machinery, filled on the packaging machine, and then sealed together. Others just take pre-fabricated pouches or b
Tom Dunn, managing director of Flexpacknology
ags and fill and seal those. So, there’s a fill seal sequence in the equipment world that needs to be addressed in all formats. And that’s sort of the guiding principle that I’ve always gone by in the design processes that I’ve been involved in.
Over the last couple of decades, there have been changes in the mechanical design of the packaging machinery that were pursued [for] machine optimization and maybe economics and versatility in the CPGs’ packaging rooms— but without regard to the materials supplier, the co-supplier partner.
Materials have to go through machines before they’re filled with products. That’s sort of the first gut check that goes into designing a product. And particularly when you mention sustainability and recyclability, all those are materials focused. But it’s not going to be possible to just address the material changes that are desired if they’re not complementary machinery adjustments that are made to keep the two in synchrony and the packaging rooms running smoothly in the CPG companies.
What do you mean by keeping the materials and the machines in synchrony?
Dunn: One big example of that is the efficacy in operations. At present, a lot of the flexible packaging materials worldwide are considering using a single material format rather than the three or four different types of plastic resins that might be used in a bag or pouch in flexible packaging. The easy way to optimize efficiency now is to specify a heat resistant plastic on the outside of the packaging material. Typically, this is oriented polyester film. That is then exposed to very high temperature heat seal surfaces from the outside. That heat energy then transfers through the packaging material to the inside surface of the package. There the thermoplastic plastic layers weld together to form a seal.
The temperature of the sealing surfaces directly affects the speed with which the packages are filled and sealed and taken off to inventory or case packing and the distribution system. This is a standard constraint of fill/seal machines that current materials have been designed to accommodate. There are some machinery advances like ultrasonic sealing that had been tried but sort of dismissed as a solution in search of a problem, or an expensive change or adjustment to the existing machinery, or a buy constraint that the buyer market is not ready to pay for.
Alternate ways of fusing the inside of flexible materials together are certainly called for. I think of ultrasonics as an ideal way to do that without having to just use hot surfaces to weld all that together. There were other heat delivery methods that have been tried and even patented in the flexible packaging space but have not been widely adapted or even really looked at in the OEM space. There’s sort of gap between the material science on the materials side and the mechanical engineering discipline on the machinery side. So, you have two professions talking about a common challenge in two different languages that don’t really understand each other very well.
What or who is ultimately driving the move to mono-materials and how does it change things?
Dunn: Well, justifying capital investments involves many functions. These different functional priorities within a CPG company each have a dog in those capex races. Marketing departments want good-looking packages with label declaration about the company’s sustainability performance. The packaging experts want a versatile package that protects the product from the time it’s packaged to the time it is consumed by the consumer The operations group wants to make those packages as quickly and as economically as possible. They don’t want to be saddled with a lot of new capital depreciation for new equipment. So, you’ve got a lot of cooks in the CPG/food kitchen that are involved in a decision to buy machinery or start a retrofit project. All of this makes for a process that is slow at best and contentious at worse.
Some things, like saving money, take precedence over these little fiefdoms having their say in the buy decision. But now, there are new players at the decision table in the form of insistence on “sustainability” from the public, the not-for-profit groups, the supermarkets, and the other distributors. Those expectations need attention, and they need it fast. I’m personally trying to push for those mono-material structures for flexible packages in a way that starts them out as cleared compositions for food contact uses and keeps them suitably safe and cleared for food contact through the recycling process and going forward so that the next iteration of food packaging can use both recycled resin and virgin resin to accomplish the necessary packaging functionality. To do that you’ll need to get rid of the polyester that’s in just about every standup pouch and many other packages now. Instead, they’ll use some sort of oriented polyethylene or polypropylene, and then all layers can be recycled together into a new generation of their thermoplastic flexible food packaging.
That sounds like a big endeavor. Are we there yet?
Dunn: Some initial components are in place. You’re familiar with store takeback collection bins for merchandise bags and the stretch wrap that palletizes products that are delivered from distribution centers to the retail outlets. All that plastic goes into those bins, but now instead of going back into a new generation of merchandise bags, most of that plastic is going back into composite lumber (substantially degraded in terms of its value).
The future I envision is the general concept of “extended producer responsibility.” It is being proposed as the way to go for those consumer product goods companies who leave packaging garbage in households for somebody else to dispose. They need to step up and take responsibility for collecting those materials and recycling them for reuse in another generation of packaging.
And if they do it right, they can maintain ownership of that recycled plastic and use that to meet their “recycled plastic content” requirements in the next generation of packaging materials. So you end up with sort of a steady state level of recycled plastic being used in a generation of consumer product goods plastic packaging. It’s just in the last 12 months that the world of beverage bottles have actually taken all polyester bottles and kept them suitably pure and cleared for reuse in food contact packaging. They reappear as a recycled polyester bottle in the next generation of those beverage distribution systems. So that part has been verified. By avoiding the problems associated with the status quo for curbside single-source blue-bin collection of recyclables — in which we find all manner of motor oil and laundry detergent and whatever other chemical products are sold in plastic containers that can contaminate food grade plastics in that recycled stream — you don’t have to worry about contamination of food grade status. You can just isolate it and keep it going forward into the next generation of packaging.
That plastic recycling process itself has some existing elements that allow a CPG/food company to step up and take responsibility for the garbage that it leaves in the American households and turn it into a new generation of plastic packaging. They don’t have to worry about any market cost differential between virgin resin and recycle resin because part of this new system takes with it an expectation of using recycled resin in consumer-packaged goods. And if you can own that recycled resin because you put your effort into recycling it, recovering it, and keeping it clean and pure for return food contact use, you can basically control your own destiny and maybe pay for all that new collection and recovery processes that you now delegate to the garbage utility and local governments.
Hear more from Tom and ask your questions on the live Flexible Packaging Food Movement webinar on Tuesday, June 18, 2024 at 2:00 EDT.
Filed Under: Food + beverage, Packaging