As flexible packaging industry brings circularity as central element for major decisions along value chain, the opportunities to design new packages that facilitates this vision became abundant. These changes, however, are not trivial, as new recyclable structures, commonly known as Designed for Recyclability (D4R), not only need to maintain functional attributes and protect packaged goods but also to preferably fit into existing machinery and distribution chains, with low to no adaptations. The definition of recyclability can vary from country to country as the different waste streams can be collected and recycled based on existing current and planned infrastructure. The attractiveness of waste streams is quite often driven by the demand for recycled materials and their quality to fit into broad range of applications and, for flexible packaging waste, the migration from multi-material combinations towards mono-material flexible packaging structures can create a huge improvement on homogeneity and as consequence quality of recycled materials. Flexible packaging based on polyethylene is frequently recycled using an existing waste stream, including in USA as part of Store Drop Off collection infrastructure.<br/>The movement to mono-material based packaging structures is a real trend and presents technical challenges that can be bucketed in three main areas: 1- product shelf life maintenance, 2- packaging packaging production at scale and 3- abuse resistance to withstand transportation and handling. Each of these areas demand important advancements on molecular design of polyethene resins to improve barrier performance, allow the design of stiffer packaging structures without reducing toughness and also proper compatibilization with other materials when polyethylene by itself cannot fulfill all requirements, like oxygen barrier. Novel approaches on film processing, with stronger emphasis on orientation, are becoming more relevant in this space, raising the demand for new resins characteristics to extract all value from them. This paper reflects on this journey, highlighting the enablers for designing mono-material polyethylene packaging and the spaces for future innovations and presenting some of the challenges that must be addressed downstream of the design process to enable full scale implementation.

Technical enablers for polyethylene mono-material packaging designs

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