Sustainable PE Film

Sustainability and the Circular Economy are both a challenge and an opportunity to flexible packaging producers. Recyclable pouches based on all-PE multilayer structures, utilizing new resins and perhaps techniques like MDO or biaxial orientation, appear to be major contenders against glass, metal, and multi-material film structures.

Plastic film-based pouches are fast evolving in both variety of design and breadth of applications in packaging of dry and frozen foods, liquid foods, pet foods and non-food household products. Due to growing demand for sustainable packaging options from consumers and brand owners, all-PE structures have already gained a lead simply because of their potential recyclability advantage over multilayer, multi-material film structures. What’s more, manufacture of plastic pouches boasts 70% lower emissions than production of aluminum containers; and the pouches take up far less space than rigid containers, are very damage resistant, and lightweight and cheaper and more energy-efficient to transport.

A handful of leading polyolefin suppliers have made significant commercial strides in all-PE pouches within the last half-decade, and their specialty, high-performance PE polymers, including metallocene-catalyzed LLDPE (mLLDPE), allow processors to further downgauge films. There are also advances in HDPE, polyolefin elastomers and plastomers, and specialty coatings that allow replacement of film structures that contain PET or nylon for barrier properties and increased stiffness.

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