FachPack 2024: Korozo Group brings recycle-ready flexible packaging to life with Digital Product Passports

25 Sep 2024 --- Korozo Group is showcasing prototype spouted pouches made using its proprietary Korocy film at FachPack 2024 in Nuremberg, Germany. Working with R-Cycle, the supplier has developed and implemented “Digital Product Passports” (DPPs) to allow customers easier access to information about its sustainable flexible packaging solutions online. 

Kororcy is a polyolefin-based, PA-free flexible laminated film featuring an “enhanced” PE formulation designed for high clarity, stiffness and strength, and a PP formulation offering easy-open peel functions. Both materials use Korozo’s in-house, “state-of-the-art” extrusion technology.

The prototype spouted pouches feature a QR code directly linking to the pack’s DPP. This link lets customers view specific information such as material type, composition, weight, density and dimensions.

DPPs also offer information on the pouches’ recycled content and recyclability, ensuring the pack is treated responsibly from manufacturing to the end of its life.

“We know that brands are looking for ways to make sure their packaging is sustainable and give consumers the ability to make responsible choices,” comments Fatih Imre, technical account manager, consumer packaging at Korozo.

“DPPs enable us to bring the flexible packaging industry’s circular future a step closer. Our recycle-ready monomaterial flexible packaging has already shifted the industry in this direction. Showcasing the packs alongside the capability of DPPs is a powerful message to the industry — a fully circular flexible packaging industry is achievable, but also on the verge of becoming a reality.”

Surveilling the entire value chain

R-Cycle makes relevant information that is automatically recorded during packaging production and filling available and retrievable to the entire value chain. 

To do this, R-Cycle integrates with ERP systems and solutions to extract the relevant data and create DPPs.

As the information is based on an open standard from GS1, it is interoperable with other systems and thus accelerates the automation of digital data exchange for packaging. 

This all supports the European Commission’s introduction of DPPs, aimed at providing information from the origin and composition to the repair, recycling and disposal of individual pieces – and all relevant steps in between – as part of an effort to move the continent toward a circular economy.

Packaging Insights continues to report live from Nuremberg on the FachPack show floor this week. Among highlights, MBM Innovations is combining its VSM vacuum packaging technology with Pack-Age — dsm-firmenich’s high-performance maturation membrane — to optimize the maturation process of aged cheese and slash costs for producers and consumers.