Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, 1st November 2019: Essel Propack Ltd., an Indian multi-national company in the business of manufacturing laminated plastic tubes, today announced a major breakthrough innovation in the form of recyclable HDPE barrier tubes. Essel Propack’s Platina 250 and Green GML 300 Lamitubes have been recognized by Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR), USA as meeting or exceeding the strict APR HDPE critical guidance criteria. This achievement is a major step forward in delivering on Essel’s sustainability commitments.
This is a first-of-its-kind breakthrough in the tube packaging market, essentially for brands looking to convert to sustainable barrier packaging formats which are recyclable.
On the occasion of this milestone Essel Propack’s Business Leadership Team mentioned, “We are extremely delighted, as this will open the doors for many such innovations in the near future and we will proactively reach out to every customer to convert to this packaging format and increase the economy of scale to make this an easy adapting solution for every brand. This will enable Essel Propack to globally participate with customers and help them to achieve their sustainability commitments.”
The R&D team based out of Essel’s focussed innovation facility in Maharashtra, India worked extensively on several design and formulation options in developing recyclable HDPE barrier tubes. The unique and complex task to the team was to Innovate on sustainable tubes without compromising any of the functional features of the tubes like feel, shelf life, safety and machinability requirements for the various generations of production lines.
After use, the Platina & GML tubes can be recycled in the dominant #2 plastic stream used across the globe for recycling milk cans, Juice bottles etc. Use of HDPE in Platina and GML tubes increases the stiffness of the tubes, enabling down gauging/reducing polymer content and in helping users to deliver on their sustainability commitments.
This innovation comes at a point where consumer product marketers are looking for sustainability solutions to meet their stakeholder commitments on Reducing, Recycling and Reusing (3 R’s) their packaging. Essel as a responsible tube supplier to Global Consumer Brands will proactively offer this innovation to their Partners not only to enable them to achieve their sustainability targets, but also to fulfil their responsibility towards the society.
Following this development, Essel will be working closely with partners to streamline the value chain of the tube usages and disposal of the same along with the reusability of its contents in different product streams. The company will extensively promote this to Partners, work with different municipalities and local agencies, raw material users where the tube recycled resin qualifies to be out into different product raw material streams. One of such an initiative has been Project Liberty & Etain (PCR) tubes.
As a responsible company, Essel Propack has always strived hard towards achieving better sustainability. Some of the other notable initiatives are: –
1. Project Liberty – Essel Propack’s “Project Liberty” is a significant initiative to support environmental sustainability. With the vision to make every tube made by Essel Recyclable, ‘Project Liberty’ is a path-breaking attempt to recycle multilayer aluminium based lamitubes.
Using proprietary technology, ‘Project Liberty’ allows for the separation of the aluminium and polymers into two distinct and reusable streams, without the use of any chemicals or heat. Once separated, both the Aluminium and Polymer fractions recovered from ABL tubes can be recycled safely.
2. Etain® (PCR Tubes) – Tubes made with up to 25% Post-Consumer recycled resin content, promoting the use of PCR resins, reducing the demand for virgin raw materials.
With unanimous accord that various Innovation must be done for encouragement of plastic recycling, corporates and various associations are taking big moves. With Essel Propack’s Recyclable Laminated tubes getting its recognition by APR USA,has already achieved a step ahead and over the next few months it aims to focus its development and success with customers.
