London Packaging Week: Berry Global showcases circular plastic packaging for personal care
29 Sep 2022 | Berry Global
Speaking at London Packaging Week, Joe Horton, product line director at Berry Global, takes us through the company’s Bmore collection of circular plastic solutions for personal care customers. The collection focuses on four key areas: recyclability, recycled content, reusability and refills and reduced weight. Berry Circular Polymers produces PCR for use across the company’s PE solutions, while its new CleanStream facility in the UK will soon supply recycled PP for packaging.
This is Beatrice Verlander reporting from London Packaging Week 2022.
I'm here at the Barry stand with Joe Horton, product line director.
Welcome, Joe.
What are the major trends in personal care packaging and how do your solutions tap into these trends?
The key trend in particular in personal care packaging at the moment focuses around sustainability and more specifically circular solutions.
So the Berry Be collection of circular solutions is central to us delivering on this for our customers.
The collection focuses on four key areas.
Recyclability including recycled contents, reusability and refills, and reduced weight and lightweight in plastic.
So we have pulled together a range of technologies from across the very global sites to ensure that we offer a range of products to meet these key demands.
And what impact has the introduction of the UK plastic packaging tax had on your customers, and how equipped are you to help them meet the 30% recycled content requirement?
From many of our UK sites we've been running with 30% or more PCR material in our bottles for up to 20 years, so the full range of standard bottles, in particular in the UK, come with recycled content as standard for customers who wish to include it.
The huge expertise in development across the very global group of companies allows us to look at more applications of recycled material in a range of different products such as pumps, jars, and other dispensing solutions.
And the availability of recycled plastic is a big issue for the industry.
How are you able to secure a reliable supply of recycled material?
Berry's excellence in supply chain, we have great relationships with a huge number of PCR suppliers.
The development teams at each site are equipped to ensure that these different materials can be run in our production facilities by utilizing their extensive knowledge.
And most importantly, Berry is focused on driving in-house solutions, so berry circular polymers produce PCR material for use across the Berry range in polyethylene solutions and soon to be polypropylene solutions from the new Clean stream facility in the UK.
And in what way are you helping brands meet the growing demand for e-commerce delivery while balancing sustainability?
We see e-commerce and sustainability not as two opposing requirements from customers, but two that can go hand in hand.
So many of our products are being lightweighted to make them more environmentally friendly, but also it makes them much more easier and much cheaper for customers to post and send through those courier channels.
So for example, Our flat wine bottle that has been on the market for a couple of years now that we worked in collaboration with a customer on delivers both an e-commerce solution for them as as including 30% recycled plastic in a product previously that would have been centered around a less environmentally friendly polymer or material.
What are your latest decorative and printing capabilities enabling brands to stand out on the shelf?
We're showcasing a range of our new decoration innovations and ideas with customers at the show here in London this week.
That's both on bottles, on closures, and on flexible tubes.
So we offer a wide range of printing technologies of hot foil blocking and working in partnership with subcontractors, shrink shrink sleeving and labeling to ensure that we can meet customers' needs, whatever they are.
Thank you.
