Material Efficiency: The Key to Meeting Sustainability Goals in the Beverage Industry

An article published last month in Packaging Europe (see link in comments) highlighted the challenges major beverage companies face in meeting their sustainability targets. Coca-Cola, for instance, has revised its environmental goals, extending deadlines and adjusting targets. These changes reflect the real-world challenges of implementing sustainable practices at scale, including costs, quality concerns, and the complexities of global infrastructure and regulations. Sustainable packaging solutions like alternative materials or improved recycling systems require high upfront investments, making them hard to scale and come at an additional cost that consumers are reluctant to absorb.

Material Efficiency, an Overlooked Solution:

Material efficiency, meaning getting more performance out of existing materials, inherently addresses the hurdles of scale, cost, and additional complexity faced by sustainability solutions based on new materials or recycling systems. It combines sustainability with greater economic efficiency. Indeed, material efficiency implies that you can do more with the same infrastructure and materials and maintain compliance with existing regulation.

This is where Keiryo Packaging's innovative technology comes into play.

The innovative processing technology developed by Keiryo illustrates the merits of materials efficiency.

How? The Keiryo technology leverages the injection process of a polymer to change its morphology by changing the level of organisation of its crystalline and amorphous components. The level of molecular organisation defines the efficiency of a material. This is best illustrated by carbon. Carbon is the basic component of both coal and diamonds.

Keiryo developed and patented a processing technology that increases the morphological organisation of polymers, leading to a better-performing material. A modelling software defines the conditions under which the morphological changes can be triggered and designs the only physical component of the Keiryo technology: a 3D-printed nozzle that is retrofitted onto existing injection machinery.

The benefits are multiple:

A.Economic Benefits

-Reduced Material Usage: enhancing polymers' performance, allowing packaging production using less material, thereby generating a direct financial benefit through cost savings.

-Cost-Effective and scalable Implementation: Unlike solutions requiring extensive new infrastructure, integration into existing production lines addresses the capital expenditure concerns that often hinder sustainability initiatives.

-Maintaining Quality Standards: Improving material functionality without compromising product quality ensures that sustainability efforts don't come at the expense of performance.

B.Environmental Benefits The cascading benefits of material efficiency are significant:

Reduced CO2 Emissions: Less material extraction and processing reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions.

-Waste Reduction: Using less material per product can help decrease the volume of waste generated, potentially lowering Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) costs.

-Improved Recyclability:  enhancing polymer performance without additives can lead to purer recycling streams.

Looking Forward 

Beverage companies can make significant strides toward their sustainability goals without sacrificing commercial competitiveness by embracing material efficiency based innovations. Keiryo's material efficiency technology exemplifies this, demonstrating that environmental responsibility and economic viability can coexist. We believe that this approach represents the future of sustainable packaging. #sustainability, #packagingeurope, #materialsefficiency,#plastics, #blowmoulding.

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