USA – Material science and manufacturing company Avery Dennison has partnered with Dow to develop a sustainable new hotmelt label adhesive solution to recycle filmic labels and packaging.
The new olefinic hotmelt adhesive can mechanically recycle polyolefin filmic labels and polypropylene (PP) or polyethylene (PE) packaging together in one stream.
It is the first of its kind on the label market and is approved by Recyclass for recycling in the HDPE colored stream – Class B.
According to Avery Dennison, the hotmelt adhesives offer better performance in labels for chilled applications like food in comparison to standard hotmelts that lower the usability of recycled PP/PE material.
Dow Packaging & Specialty Plastics global marketing manager Imran Munshi said: “It is Dow’s goal to deliver 3 million metric tons per year of circular and renewable solutions by 2030.
“Collaborations like this will help accelerate our contributions towards a circular economy for plastic packaging.”
The new olefinic hotmelt is based on the same chemistry as PP/PE packaging. The latest product, when combined with a polyolefin face stock, the label and packaging can be treated as a mono-material and recycled together.
This provides better recyclability than conventional hotmelts while maintaining the performance, the adhesive manufacturing company claimed.
Avery Dennison said that the development of the new adhesive was powered by its design-for-recycling thinking and supported by Dow’s polymer science expertise.
The olefinic hotmelt adhesive is based on Dow’s Affinity GA polyolefin plastomers and sold by Avery Dennison under the name CF3050 in the Europe, Middle East, and North Africa (EMENA) regions.
Avery Dennison Materials Group EMENA senior research associate Jarkko Pitko added: “The joint launch of this new olefinic hotmelt is a great example of how collaborating with partners across the supply chain, like Dow, is key to deliver innovations that help reduce waste, enable the circularity of plastics, and advance the circular economy.”
In November last year, Avery Dennison announced reusable plastic packaging and performance pooling solutions firm Tosca as its European partner for pooled plastic pallets.
The firm explains that plastic pallets are more durable than their wooden counterparts, as they can be reused more often and are less prone to breakages which can help reduce the risk of damage and waste in the supply chain.
Set to take effect across factories and distribution centers in the EU, UK, Norway, Switzerland, and Turkey, the collaboration is expected to benefit Tosca’s pooling program, in which clean, empty pallets are delivered to the company’s sites from service centers across Europe at the end of the year.
For all the latest packaging and printing industry news from Africa and the World, subscribe to our NEWSLETTER, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, like us on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
