How material selection can help you fulfil your responsibilities
Technically advanced materials and pEPR
How material selection can help you fulfil your responsibilities
There are some obvious ways in which materials selection helps companies to reduce their environmental impact and therefore their pEPR obligations. However, there are also some lesser known gains to be made.
Below Josh Gibson, Sales Director at YPS( Yorkshire Packaging Systems) and expert in flexible packaging materials, takes us through the considerations you can explore for your own operation.
Although companies have now been reporting their level of packaging use for their consumer goods and its disposal route for a little while, the introduction of the fee requirement later this year is further focussing the industry on this significant subject.
Materials choice can affect the pEPR requirement within all three elements of this legislation: the volume of packaging waste, the base material and the material’ s recyclability. It’ s the first of these
112 FDPP- www. fdpp. co. uk where gains can be made but where producers often have less knowledge about their options.
One key way to reduce overall packaging material use, and therefore packaging waste, is to specify ultra-thin materials. These technically advanced materials are designed to deliver the same strength at a lower micron than standard materials, ensuring that there is no compromise on product protection.
YPS supplies a range of materials that fall into this category, manufactured by leading specialist flexible film producers Bolloré, all of which are the thinnest film of their type in the market. Examples include:
o 15 mμ lidding films o 9 mμ shrink films o 6 mμ stretch films
We have worked with customers who have been able to reduce material use by as much as 74 %, by replacing their previous material specification with these ultrathin alternatives. With the new charge of £ 423 per tonne of plastic packaging, for an operation using 10T each year, with this level of saving their obligation would be reduced from £ 4,230 to just £ 1,099. Another route to reduced materials use is to ensure that your machinery is functioning at its best. Our team of inhouse packaging engineers always thoroughly check and test machine set up when they install new machinery supplied by YPS. It’ s also an element that they check when they service existing equipment or conduct Site Sustainability Surveys, which is a service we provide that is focussed on achieving further gains in this area.
For much of the automated packaging systems that we supply – certainly shrink and stretch wrapping systems – the basic material will be plastic, without