Innovative coating to be a driver in green packaging

      In green era, green packaging represents a new attitude which stresses lightweight, low cost, environmentally friendliness and food safety. In different forms of packaging, packaging coatings play a key role. The innovation of this technology area will definitely drive the development and push the boundaries of green packaging in all directions

      AkzoNobel Packaging Coatings, a leading global supplier of coatings, inks and adhesives to the packaging industry, demonstrates how the researchers in the dedicated industry do to investigate new formulations that are safer. Just in RD&I alone, its packaging coatings business has 170 experts trying to figure out how to deliver more and protect longer, while having as little impact on the environment as possible.

      In an article “Wrapper’s delight” in the company’s magazine “The AkzoNobel Magazine”, Kaj van Alem, the Director of Research for Packaging Coatings, said, “We’re mostly focused on protecting metal packaging for food and beverages. It may not seem especially important, but if you think about food safety, what we do is vitally important.”

      Van Alem also mentioned about the controversial issues of bisphenol A (BPA), an organic compound common in plastics but also present in coatings. Concerning the safety of BPA, mass resources have been invested to find alternatives for use in food packaging coatings. But, Van Alem believes that the bigger challenges are to combine high performance with a minimal environmental footprint, to build new functionality into packaging and to come up with radically new ways of delivering product to the customer.

      As said, one of the major tasks at AkzoNobel Packaging Coatings is to increase the percentage of biorenewable polymers in the coatings, and progress has been achieved. According to the article, the company has got a couple of products with 10 – 20% bio-renewables. However, the researchers are aiming for 80 – 90%, using for example lignin-based polymers. The lignin material can actually be obtained from the paper industry – basically waste wood pulp – or other sources like corn husks, which would ordinarily go into landfills. “So that’s almost a cradle to cradle approach,” added Van Alem.

      Meanwhile, AkzoNobel has developed the product line EvCote, which are coatings for paper packaging that include recycled PET from plastic bottles and bio-renewable materials as source materials. These coatings have the desirable gloss, provide excellent grease, water and scratching resistance, but break down readily. This technology is attractive to multinational food producers and purveyors who are eager to support environmental protection. For instance, for cereal manufacturers, there’s no need for the extra inside package if they can coat the inside of the cereal box – eliminating a step in the packaging and a huge quantity of packaging material.
In addition, the biggest impact to ecology is that these coating enable the paper to be composted, which is a change from chemical coatings that are applied to paper packaging and don’t break down. EvCote made its commercial debut at London Olympic 2012 on French fry bags prominently labeled as “compostable packaging” by a leading fast food restaurant chain.

      Lastly, Van Alem envisions an even better packaging solution sometime in the future, which is “the coating actually is the package“. He concluded, “If we can create a polymer structure that not only provides protection and appeal, but also has the added rigidity, then we have the package. At that point, the difference between plastics and coatings begins to fade.”
                                                                  By Wangdanqiao