Elopak - Cutting back on Plastic

These days, most people take a conscientious approach towards the amount of plastic they use. Almost every day newspapers are filled with stories about how harmful it is for the environment and how long it takes to degrade once it’s been thrown away.

Although the packaging industry plays an important role in reducing food waste and ensuring products reach consumers safely, it is also a major source of plastic waste. The UN estimates that over one million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute, and over half of all plastic products are thrown away after just one use, with roughly 400 million tonnes of plastic waste produced each year.

Diverse options

So, what options do companies have to cut back on the amount of plastic they use in their packaging and prevent this environmental burden from being passed on to consumers?

One alternative is beverage cartons. Beverage cartons are a natural and convenient alternative to plastic bottles that fit within a low-carbon, circular economy. Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) studies have shown that these cartons, which are based primarily on paperboard, contribute to fewer greenhouse gas emissions and have a lower carbon footprint than plastic bottles.

For instance, a May 2021 LCA conducted for fresh milk and juice packaging in North America found that cartons have a 32% smaller carbon footprint than HDPE bottles and 60% smaller than PET. By choosing to package liquid food such as juice and milk in beverage cartons rather than plastic bottles, companies empower consumers to make more sustainable, climate-conscious decisions that cut down on emissions.

Beverage cartons offer less materials

Of course, the reason plastics are so ubiquitous in the packaging industry is because they are convenient and help to maintain product integrity. Even beverage cartons, though based mainly on paperboard, use plastics for things like screw caps so that consumers can reseal a product when they are not using it.

Elopak is consistently working to reduce the amount of materials used in its cartons – both in terms of plastics and paperboard, in order to minimise their impact on the environment.

In 2021, Elopak launched the Pure-TwistFlip™ tethered cap, the smallest version of which is Elopak’s lightest screwcap to-date. Less weight means less plastic and thus a smaller carbon footprint, while still maintaining convenience.

Furthermore, tethered caps are designed to stay attached to the carton throughout its entire lifecycle, ensuring that they are disposed of properly. This is in accordance with the EU directive on single-use packaging.

As an alternative solution, Elopak helps companies and consumers to cut back on their use of plastics by offering cartons without plastic closures. The Pure-Pak® Imagine carton, which was introduced in 2020, is Elopak’s most environmentally friendly carton to date and is designed without a screw cap. Instead, it has an easy-to-open funnel feature resulting in 46% less plastic than a conventional carton and ten times less plastic than a PET bottle.

“ Elopak helps companies and consumers to cut back on their use of plastics by offering cartons without plastic closures ”

Building on sustainability

By building on the sustainable, low carbon and low-plastic solution that beverage cartons offer, Elopak provides companies with a variety of packaging options ensuring product safety and consumer convenience. Ultimately, it is this variety of choice which allows all companies to find a plasticslashing solution that best suits their needs and the needs of consumers.

KURZ Cold-transfer brilliance

Currently commercial print jobs, magazines and wet-adhesive labels are predominantly finished with cold-transfer decorations via sheet-fed printing. They provide a brilliant gloss finish, as well as offering great performance and an excellent price-performance ratio. SPN has discovered that the latest from Kurz, the KPS SX+ offers high quality, optimal process stability by matching customised cold-transfer designs with a substrate by means of a special adhesive.

Furthermore, when it comes to improving sustainability, the company’s Recosys® process, is the first in the world to make it possible for any transfer-residue films to be recycled. Here the story is taken up by Kurz: “With its extended production window, KPS SX+ masters the balance between design diversity and technical possibilities, plus free’s you from the costly constraints of several products for different finishes. This quality is suitable for conventional systems, as well as UV systems in terms of adhesives and colours, for different substrates, food packaging and foil saving units, for both large-scale and delicate motifs.

“ KPS SX+ masters the balance between design diversity and technical possibilities ”

Clear advantages

From the technical and economic point of view, there is a significant reduction in production costs. Stable, high quality production quality, design flexibility and an easy to set-up Plug-and-Play process. In addition, the process optimises material resources.

Broad-spectrum design

Processed with the right consumables, the new KPS SX+ embellishment is also ideal for jobs where laminates are to be replaced:

• High gloss level • High opacity • Advanced design possibilities, from large-scale to delicate • Flexible overprinting • Works optimally on all cold transfer units • For all adhesives/color systems: UV, oxidationconventional, low-migration • For a wide selection of substrates

High-scoring Sustainability

The Kurz KPS SX+ not only meets global requirements, it also does not affect the automatic sorting process, nor the packaging de-inkability or composting processes. This means that the end product remains recyclable and de-inkable. In fact, what really makes the difference is that as with all transfer products from Kurz, no film or laminate remains on the surface of the finished product, simply extremely thin layers of coating. In addition to this, the KPS series is qualified as KPS RECO+ for the KURZ PET recycling program RECOSYS®. This return and recycling system re-processes a valuable raw material from used PET carriers.

RECOSYS® is the world’s first process that makes it possible for Kurz transfer film residues to be recycled. The system can be used to produce both recyclables and monomers for PET polymerisation. This converts residual transfer products into a high-quality injection molding material called RECOPOUND®.

Announcing ‘KPS Slim’

KPS slim (patent pending): Provides premium Cold Transfer on 6 µm with First-Class Sustainability Benefits. With this latest development we are raising our sustainability bar yet further. In order to match our wafer-thin metallisation layers, we have now significantly slimmed down the transfer-carrier for our cold transfer decoration. In this way, we are reducing the PET carrier thickness of our decoration product by a huge 50%. In turn, this means more running meters on one roll, fewer reel changes, and therefore less downtime and faster set-up times. All-in-all, the PET is only a carrier material and is not applied to your print sheets. What remains on your packaging is a brilliant gloss, even on complex surfaces. KPS slim is optimal for challenging designs and fine gradations.

It scores clear points when it comes to the special features of demanding surfaces: In the case of structured material, the thin carrier lies optimally in the structure and thus achieves good decoration opacity, which would not be possible with 12 µm. With a difficult material, it is the detachability of the coating from the carrier that makes it possible to decorate successfully, without affecting the sheet quality (depending on blanket and adhesive).

Premium Performance means….

• Maximum process safety and efficiency • Reduced adhesive consumption • Higher opacity • More gloss • Extremely high design flexibility • Even half tones/gradations with just one product (depending on the printing blanket) • High speed • Better transfer to difficult substrates • Improved edge definition • Fewer reel changes

Premium sustainability

• More running meters on one roll • Lower weight with the same running meters • Less waste and decreased disposal costs • Thinner PET carrier • Reduced carbon footprint

Kurz cold transfer for sheet-fed offset printing provides unrivalled impact at the Point-of-Sale (POS). Whether inline or offline, our products perform optimally with sheet-fed offset printing. Plus: Kurz cold transfer has substantially widened the spectrum of design possibilities, thus enabling metallic gloss designs to be produced that would rarely be achievable to a comparable level of brilliance by any other means”.

KHS Quick-change artist

The art of achieving, high-speed, fully-automated quick-change lines for beverage varieties, has finally been perfected by the Dortmund company KHS.

With the number of SKUs on the increase, many bottlers of water and soft drinks are calling for complete line changeovers that take minutes and not hours to turn-around. With the company’s latest InnoPET iflex system this leading Dortmund company is coming ever closer to achieving its goal.

Beverage producers today face a growing number of challenges, particularly with regard to the filling and packaging of their products. Today consumers are becoming ever-more environmentally aware and demanding ‘green’ packaging that has as little impact as possible on climate-change, whilst expecting this to be convenient, safe and inexpensive. End-users also want to be able to choose from an increasingly diverse range of beverages and packaging styles The resulting on-going rise in item variety, means that beverage producers need to frequently change-over their production lines. This naturally affects the overall equipment efficiency (OEE) and often costs bottlers a lot of time and money – this should also seen against a background of increasing regulation and growing economic pressures. On the one hand, the beverage industry is subject to strict provisions governing the avoidance of plastic waste, the recycling of containers and secondary packaging, as well as the reduction of carbon emissions. On the other hand, it needs to boost efficiency and productivity in order to cut operating and personnel costs – ideally by using technical equipment that is easy to operate.

Modular automation concept

This is where KHS comes in with its new InnoPET iflex, a modular automation concept that was initially developed for PET lines that had a large number of SKUs. Now with fast, reliable and reproducible changeovers, it significantly boosts OEE.

If no changes to the bottle neck, thread or label type need to be made, formats can be switched over from one SKU to another in 30 minutes – including running the system empty and starting it up again (example for non-returnable PET line with an InnoPET TriBlock stretch blow molder/labeler/filler block and two operators).

A simple product changeover can even be performed within ten minutes if required. These figures apply to outputs of up to 50,000 bottles per hour holding between 330 millilitres and 1.5 litres of still or carbonated beverage.

With the iflex option from KHS, up to 80% of all manual line conversion tasks are superfluous. Some process steps already require virtually no operator intervention at all. Full automation wouldn’t be economically viable here, meaning that some tasks are either semi-automatic, or carried out by hand as in the past. This means that KHS systems save a total of 3.5 operator hours during format changeovers all the way down the line down the line.

This is facilitated by machine options that are carefully co-ordinated with one another and whose degree of automation has been specially optimised to yield shorter changeover times. Parallel to this, supporting software solutions ensure that changeover routines are documented and can be faithfully reproduced by the operator at any given time.