How Can Paper-Based Beverage Packaging Capture the Sustainability Dividend?

Amid the sustainability boom, and driven by leading global brands, the beverage paper-based packaging industry has met both the development opportunity of surging market demand and new challenges such as low recycling rates and high market demands for innovation.

Coca-Cola and Pepsi lead the way with paper bottles,

demand for beverage paper-based packaging surges

At the end of last year, the international environmental group Break Free From Plastic released a report; after classifying the plastic waste it collected, the organization gave a ranking of the world's top ten polluters in 2020, with the top three being Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestlé. All three companies are major beverage producers, and the plastic pollution problem of the beverage industry has drawn worldwide attention.

In order to shake off the label of "major plastic polluter," Coca-Cola and Pepsi have announced one after another this year that they will cooperate with leading paper bottle manufacturers to sell beverages in paper bottles in the future, in order to reduce plastic use.

For companies of the size of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, adopting 100% paper packaging for their products would have enormous demonstrative significance for the entire consumer goods industry.

And indeed, driven by this, beverage paper-based packaging has captured plenty of attention and generated strong market demand. More and more brands are beginning to try paper-based packaging to replace traditional plastic packaging so as to reduce plastic use.

The beverage paper-based packaging industry still faces many challenges

Driven by China's new "plastic restriction order" in early 2020, the paper-based packaging industry has met both new development opportunities and new challenges.

Beverage paper-based packaging is currently mostly used for products such as milk and yogurt. Although beverage producers are also trying to use paper-based packaging, the recycling difficulties of beverage paper-based packaging still cannot be ignored.

China produces about 60 billion units of paper-based composite packaging each year, basically more than 40 per person per year, or over 3.5 per person per month. At present the recycling rate for this type of packaging is about 20%; generally speaking its recovery sources include household consumption and industrial waste (offcuts from defective products, mainly packaging materials discarded as scrap from the production and processing stages).

Besides the recycling challenge, the beverage industry has a rich variety of products with different performance requirements for paper-based packaging, which places higher innovation demands on the beverage paper-based packaging industry.

To be better applied in the beverage industry, paper-based packaging materials should step up innovation, develop mature substitutes that match or approach the widely used non-degradable plastic products in both performance and cost, and launch functional products that meet market demand.

——This article is reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-378359.html