Our Sustainability Progress During COVID-19
The first half year has been dominated by many unforeseen events and often, insecurity. But the first months in the COVID-19 pandemic have also shown that people are looking to live a healthier and more sustainable life in the future. We are working on designing our label and sleeve solutions for recycling. Our strategy is simple – labels and sleeves should not hinder but rather enable the recycling process at the end-of-life of the food or beverage packaging they decorate. For the future, we are working on more circular solutions and saving materials by using as much recycled content as possible.
So, what have we been working on in the last months?
EcoFloat – Enabling bottle-to-bottle recycling
A major development was our brand-new EcoFloat material that is ideally engineered for PET bottle-to-bottle recycling, thus closing the loop. The materials is a low density polyolefin film that easily separates from the PET flakes in the washing bath. This enables a high quality of the recycled PET flakes and makes the process very effective. In July we got the official approval of the European PET Bottle Forum (EBPB) – evidence for the good recycling performance of the sleeve film!
rPET Labels and Sleeves
Using rPET for their beverage and food packaging is a huge topic for many of our customers. It has a great impact on their CO2 footprint and we have started offering label and sleeve solutions with rPET and other recycled content. For example, CCL offers permanent self-adhesive labels based on PET, which are available with up to 70%-90% PCR content and WashOff labels are currently available with 30% rPET from PCR – higher percentages of recycled materials are currently being tested for the future. Medium shrink transparent PETG film for sleeves with approximately 30% recycled material is also a standard offering now! Packaging Europe featured our new product range in an article.
Labels for Zero-Waste Platform Loop
In the past months we also developed special labels, that are used on selected Loop products after the zero-waste platform debuted in the UK and partnered up with TESCO. Our labels are used on aluminium and glass containers and can easily be washed off in Loop’s washing facilities and thus enable their immediate reuse. If you’d like to know more about this project read our “Loving the Loop!” article.
This is just the beginning. CCL Label has used the last months to concentrate on new developments and technologies to drive sustainability even further. We are working on many more projects that aim towards a more sustainable performance of our labels and sleeves. We will have more news, shortly – in the meantime, stay happy and healthy!
13th August 2020
