Scholle IPN and Georgia-Pacific design Amazon-approved bag-in-box for liquids

Scholle IPN is releasing a bag-in-box pack for liquid products certified by Amazon as “ship in own container” (SIOC). 

The flexible packaging supplier partnered with Georgia-Pacific’s corrugated packaging solutions to develop, test, and certify three patent-pending bag-in-box package formats according to Amazon’s stringent SIOC certification process.

The bag-in-box range includes:

• A consumer-friendly dispensing tap design.
• A pour-out style solution.
• A large-format dispensing tap design for large-volume use cases.

Shrink wrap-free
The pack sizes range from 2-23 L and require no exterior shrink wrapping. The e-commerce solution is designed for products including beverages like wine and water, cleaning chemicals and laundry chemicals.

“In e-commerce, we’re using existing – often rigid – packages that can work fine for certain applications but not necessarily for this channel,” explains Brent Haynam, commercial engineering manager for Scholle IPN.

“With rigid packaging, distributors find they need to add secondary and tertiary packaging to these products, which increases costs and doesn’t guarantee the products are going to survive delivery.”

“Switching to an efficient, flexible pack reduces the overall packaging weight, has a better product-to-package ratio, and, with this SIOC packaging, there is no need for wasteful, additional packaging in distribution.”

Haynam indicates overall carbon footprint reductions of up to 67 percent and, in some cases, total energy savings of 75 percent.

Multiple considerations
Meanwhile, Keri Wilson, senior packaging innovation engineer for Georgia-Pacific, describes the difficulty of delivering a SIOC-certified package for liquids.

“Delivering single packages of liquids through e-commerce is a significant technical challenge. We needed to design a corrugate solution that could not only protect up to 50 pounds of liquid but also survive multiple drop sequences and a multi-hour vibration test.”This bag-in-box can reduce carbon footprint by up to 67%, Scholle IPN says.

“Once we created a solution that could survive this test, we need to ensure the end-user could easily access the product and enjoy the experience without extraneous secondary wraps or hard-to-open tap perforations.”

“It’s not enough for us to just get it there; we need the packaging to perform throughout the channel, reducing waste every step of the way.”

Meanwhile, Smurfit Kappa’s 3 L Bag-in-Box packaging design has received Amazon’s “Frustration-Free Packaging” (FFP) certification.

Overcoming water scarcity
In other recent developments, Scholle IPN and Primo partnered on a project to bring safe water to US communities in bag-in-box packaging. 

Tap water can contain trace amounts of elements like mercury, lead, cyanide, and arsenic. Primo uses an exchange and filtration process to ensure drinking water is free from bacteria, parasites and heavy metals.

Meanwhile, one million bottles of water are purchased every minute, Scholle IPN highlights. Over 90 percent of these plastic water bottles never get recycled, instead ending up in landfills and oceans.

Primo wanted to replace the plastic bottle model with a solution that protects its water quality while reducing plastic waste.

In 2018, Scholle IPN debuted 2Pure, a polyethylene-based film offering a taint- and odor-free water package that also cuts down on material costs and environmental waste.

Last month, Scholle IPN announced its bag-in-box packaging for water had passed the Association of Plastic Recyclers’ “PE Film and Flexible Packaging Critical Guidance” testing, which evaluates the compatibility of flexible packaging with film-to-film recycling processes.

Edited by Joshua Poole