Recycle-ready: Amcor launches first product made from super sustainable AmLite film

25 Apr 2019 --- Global plastic packaging supplier Amcor has taken a big sustainability stride with the launch of the AmLite Ultra Recyclable high-barrier laminate pack. It is the first product made from the company’s landmark recyclable polyolefin film, which Amcor announced last year. The new high-barrier laminate can package a range of food, home, personal care and pharmaceutical products. It can be recycled in existing polyolefin recycling streams.

AmLite Ultra Recyclable is the latest addition to Amcor’s AmLite product line, which was first created in 2015 to provide metal-free barrier packaging that significantly reduced the packaging’s carbon footprint.

This new generation of AmLite adds recyclability to the environmental benefits and is the culmination of several years of R&D. The film and its application represent another advancement towards Amcor’s pledge to develop all its packaging to be recyclable or reusable by 2025.

“Our recyclable laminate delivers high-barrier protection, can be used on our customers’ filling machines, and can be recycled where polyolefin collection and recycling streams exist,” says Luca Zerbini, Vice President of Marketing, Innovation and Sustainability at Amcor.

“AmLite Ultra Recyclable will help solve sustainability challenges for consumer goods brands, pharmaceutical companies and retailers and help keep plastics out of the environment,” he adds.

The AmLite Ultra Recyclable high-barrier laminate pack can be used across a wide range of products, including food, home, personal care and pharmaceutical.AmLite can be used for a variety of formats, such as pillow pouches, stand-up and spouted pouches, bags, lidding for trays and containers and stick packs.

AmLite Ultra Recyclable will allow Amcor’s customers to move to recyclable flexible packaging across a variety of consumer-product segments, including coffee, snacks, dry pet food, baby nutrition and pharmaceuticals, as well as home and personal care.

This will be a major shift for brands, as previously, high-barrier flexible packaging was difficult to recycle. To overcome this, Amcor’s R&D team innovated to replace the PET layer of the original AmLite packaging with its breakthrough high-barrier OPP film. To validate recyclability in real conditions, the package is certified by cyclos-HTP Institute, an independent testing lab.

AmLite achieves a reduced carbon footprint by using an ultra-thin, transparent barrier coating to replace aluminum and metalized barriers. That change, combined with recyclability, can reduce a pack’s carbon footprint by up to a reported 64 percent.

AmLite Ultra Recyclable and AmLite Standard Recyclable are the first laminates in the AmLite product range to offer recyclability, adding two products to Amcor’s portfolio. AmLite Standard Recyclable, which provides medium- to high-barrier protection for ambient applications, is already on supermarket shelves thanks to some early adopter brands. AmLite Ultra Recyclable is now available for broader customer trials.

Amcor’s R&D experts are continuing their work with new polyolefin films to develop future solutions for even more demanding applications, such as recyclable packaging for retort processing.Several years in development, AmLite represents a big stride in Amcor’s goal to develop all its packaging to be recyclable or reusable by 2025.

Amcor unveiled its unique polyolefin-based film for ambient and retort high-barrier applications in September 2018, describing the launch as an important building block in the development of flexible packaging which is recycling-ready across a huge range of products.

Earlier this year, Amcor hit another sustainability milestone with the US launch of Genesis – a new high-performance laminate that offers in-store recyclability. The all-polyethylene (PE) laminate looks and feels like traditional oriented polypropylene (oPP)/PE and oriented polyester (oPET)/PE laminates and can be used to package a variety of consumer goods. Genesis is “complementary” to AmLite, Amcor’s polyolefin-based film that can be used for ambient and retort high-barrier application.

Flexible stand-up pouches have been experiencing praise from some quarters for their sustainability credentials. For example, the Flexible Packaging Association (FPA) determined that the most eco-friendly coffee pack, compare to popular alternatives, is the stand-up flexible plastic pouch. Tested across six Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs), flexible pouches demonstrated more favorable environmental attributes than steel cans and rigid plastic containers in terms of carbon impact, fossil fuel usage, water usage, product-to-package ratio, as well as the amount of packaging material going to the landfill.