Georg Müller-Hof, vice president marketing LPM Europe, said that using post-consumer waste (PCW) to manufacture label liners represents a step change in sustainability:
“Avery Dennison is focused on real-world sustainability improvements, which ultimately means ‘closing the loop’ and using post-consumer waste to create new products. These four new labelling materials not only use a liner with more than 30% recycled PET bottle content, but they are also part of our CleanFlake™ and ClearCut™ portfolios – which offer important additional sustainability gains in their own right.”
Three CleanFlake materials are now available on a thin rPET23 liner. The ‘switchable’ CleanFlake adhesive is designed to separate cleanly from PET bottles during the recycling process so that contamination of PET flakes is avoided – an important factor in ensuring that recycled PET can be recycled rather than downcycled.
A fourth material – a high clarity ClearCut PP50 TOP CLEAR-S7000-rPET23 construction – is considerably thinner than today’s market reference (PP60 with PET30), and offers high speed conversion and dispensing using the same thin rPET23 liner.
The rPET liner has been designed to convert in the same way as a conventional PET liner, with no noticeable differences in performance.
Müller-Hof said that more will follow: “We are committed to managing waste across the value chain - in line with our 2025 Sustainability Goals and to meet the needs of our customers. Moving forward, we look forward to introducing rPET liner in an expanded range of products, as well as offering products that contain recycled content and/or enable recycling of end use packaging.”