Thanks to the high cost of resins and the volume of environmentally hazardous flexible packaging products, Gilbreth Packaging is among a growing number of converters trying to be “green” by utilizing biopolymers like EarthFirst® TDO shrink film from Plastic Suppliers, Inc, a corn-based film, to reduce costs, hazardous waste and emissions.

Environmentally friendly is not often a phrase used when discussing plastic packaging, flexible or otherwise.  But when millions of tons of plastic packaging products are consumed and disposed of every year, and only a small percentage of that waste is recycled, the concept of eco-friendly packaging made from sustainable resources becomes an ever-important concern.

Over the past few years, the flexible packaging industry has responded to these concerns with biopolymer films made from renewable, natural resources that utilize starch-based crops to produce packaging that is compostable.

Two years ago, Gilbreth Packaging’s then newly hired Product Development Manager Theresa Sykes, began investigating these sustainable packaging films. She contacted Plastic Suppliers, Inc. and inquired about its EarthFirst TDO shrink film.

“To be honest with you, the first thing we thought was, ‘Wow, what a fantastic shrink film.’ It was a phenomenal shrink film above and beyond the fact that it was sustainable,” said Sykes. “I said, ‘Environmentally friendly…that’s great I guess, but, you can shrink up to 80 percent…that’s unheard of. We don’t have any films that can do that.

“So that’s when we started to partner with them and give them feedback.  I assured everyone on the management team we would be able to sell this film. Due to the fact we are getting a great shrink film, with the added bonus of being eco-friendly provides an excellent selling position”  

Plastic Suppliers’ EarthFirst TDO shrink film is derived from NatureWorks PLA resin, which utilizes the starch stored in corn and converts it into natural plant sugars. The sugar is then fermented into lactic acid, which is used to create a plastic resin pellet called polylactic acid (PLA) that can be shaped into a variety of bottles, containers, trays, films and other packaging.

Before choosing Plastic Suppliers, Gilbreth did investigate other manufacturers of PLA film, but the dedication to the shrink film market wasn’t there.

“[The other manufacturers] haven’t made a commitment to supporting this industry, and we need full-fledged support,” says Sykes. “Plastic Suppliers has come out and said, ‘we’re behind you 100 percent; and we’re willing to support this industry.’ It may be us [Gilbreth] right now, but it’s everybody else within six months, and you need to be able to support this industry.

“Plastic Suppliers has the capacity and the technology to play in this market. With [the flexible packaging industry’s] growth in shrink sleeves, you’ve got to be able to support substantial growth.”

Gilbreth was founded in 1960 as an importing company that developed a dissolvable paper used by welders to block off sections of pipe.

“Our first product was called Dissolvo – a dissolvable paper” says Brian Riley, president of Gilbreth.

“We worked with McNeil Pharmaceuticals just after the Tylenol product tampering in the early 1980s, and Gilbreth developed the tamper-evident (TE) band. That’s where it all started. After that, it was a natural evolution into a full-body label and we did a lot of business with Duracell for battery sleeves through the ‘80s and most of the ‘90s.”

Gilbreth, which today converts shrink film labels and posts $15-20 million in annual sales, was obviously interested in the capabilities of the PLA film, but also the costs involved in using such a new product. Sykes noted that just because the film was eco-friendly wasn’t enough; it still had to meet certain criteria before she could start using it.

“One of the first things I said to them was, ‘yeah, yeah, stop talking to me about that environmental [stuff], what kind of shrink film is it?’ I mean, I like it, but if it can’t perform the way we need it to perform, it doesn’t matter if it’s sustainable packaging” says Sykes.

The product passed all the necessary measuring sticks, but the final hurdle was going to be cost.

“It’s only slightly more expensive than PVC, which is the workhorse in the shrink market but considered highly environmentally unfriendly.  EarthFirst TDO shrink film is competitively priced to PETG and does as much as PETG as far as shrink percentage goes; and it’s somewhere around OPS, depending upon the fluctuations in the petroleum market,” she says.

An added benefit of the EarthFirst TDO shrink film is the expected cost savings Gilbreth found, thanks to the lower energy needs of the shrink film. It starts out shrinking at about 130 degrees F, compared to 170 degrees F for PVC. Since it requires lower temperatures, it takes less energy to shrink, and it also completes its shrink within six seconds of dwell time, according to Sykes, so tunnels that were six feet are now going to be three feet in tunnel length, and they’re also going to be turned down to their minimal temperature level.

In addition, EarthFirst TDO shrink film can run at faster speeds. Sykes says Gilbreth has run application trials at 300 bottles per minute on its existing machines, compared with 200-250 using PVC film.

“Long-term, there’s certainly going to be energy efficiencies to this,” says Sykes. “Because you’re going to be able to put in lines that take less energy and are more efficient and run faster, it’s really a phenomenal film.”

However, the difficulty with any new product, is convincing the customers to buy it, a task made a little trickier thanks to Gilbreth’s evolving management team.

“The thing that we’re excited about is the management team. We’ve all been here in our current roles for less than 21/2 years,” says Riley. “Over a six or seven year period, Gilbreth went through something like six general managers – there was a continuity gap here, and the industry senses that. We also had a turnover in sales people.

“To counter that, we’ve tried to move through the organization and improve internal processes. We tried to refocus on the company’s image and our strengths, and now we have the sales team in place. The company’s strength came back with service, quality and innovation.”

Riley noted that the perceived instability was joined by the company’s lack of a commitment to lower costs through operational improvement. Although Gilbreth had made improvements, making those cost reductions a positive sales tool had not been a priority…it is now.

The Gilbreth philosophy is simple: maximize your strengths and serve your market to the best of your ability, a philosophy echoed by Riley.

“The focus for us is to build sales. We feel we can service a market that is not being serviced by the big people. In turnaround time and flexibility; and the flexo press gives us some capabilities that they [the bigger converters] don’t necessarily have. We can easily adjust to the needs of customers of all sizes.” he says.

However, not all of Gilbreth’s customers were ready to embrace the idea of EarthFirst films…at least not at first.

“I had to convince them, until Wal-Mart came out and said, ‘We want to see sustainable films used in our flexible packaging by 2007.’ When they said that, it generated a lot of interest,” Sykes says.

After all of the testing, Gilbreth’s commercial scale up of EarthFirst TDO shrink film labels occurred in late fall of 2005, and both Sykes and Riley expect the company’s PLA films business to have significant impact on Gilbreth’s sales by the end of 2006.

Shrink was one of Plastic Suppliers’ “last frontiers,” according to Sykes, as the company’s EarthFirst products focused on packaging and label applications.

“That’s because we’re different from every other label; we demand more from our inks and from our film than any other labeling technology,” she says.

Though EarthFirst PLA films obviously have many advantages, there are some restrictions of which converters need to be aware. The EarthFirst film product is stiffer than typical shrink films. Gilbreth is using the film at 60 microns, and it is still a little stiff.

“That’s something that we as a printer need to deal with, with our tensions and what not, but we don’t see it as a stumbling block. It’s a bit of a learning curve, because it’s different than the other films,” says Sykes.

In addition, that is where other restrictions may lie for converters: EarthFirst film is not a product that can just be dropped into an existing machine running OPS or PETG film; there is a lot of testing involved with using this new film.

“It is something you have to learn how to handle on your application equipment,” says Sykes. “But we think the benefits are just enormous and they outweigh any time you might have to spend tweaking your machines to be running the EarthFirst TDO shrink film.”

Adds Riley: “EarthFirst TDO shrink films bring a whole new dynamic to shrink labels, because the conversion process is just so temperamental. But we’ve been able to work through it.”

Gilbreth has adjusted the tensions on its machines but has not reduced its running speeds, for neither finishing nor printing.

“For new applications, machines will be designed around this film,” says Sykes. “Equipment manufacturers have already looked at the film and are working on what they need to do to their machines.”

Gilbreth currently produces on a variety of wide and narrow presses. The seaming equipment was designed and built for this market and has the smallest and widest lay flat capabilities.  Gilbreth is adding a new gravure press, which will be on line early 2007.

In addition to utilizing the corn-based shrink film, Gilbreth is also looking into other ways to be environmentally conscious. Sykes says the company is looking to incorporate more environmentally friendly ink systems, ones that can be washed off completely for recyclables. The company also has solvents that it does not use, even though most of the industry does use them, because those materials can be harmful to plant workers’ health.

“We don’t use anything stronger than acetates, because we don’t want our workforce to suffer…we have a long-term workforce,” says Sykes.

Gilbreth uses both solvent and solvent-less adhesives, and has not had any problems with either on the EarthFirst TDO shrink film.

“It has excellent ink properties,” says Sykes. “It comes from Plastic Suppliers untreated and it needs no treatment. It has excellent surface tension, so it is inherently printable. There have been some tweaks to some inks for existing shrink films to make them print better; because they need a little different solvent blend to improve appearance, and those work fine on Earthfirst PLA film.”

Nevertheless, in the end, the most important benefit to using EarthFirst TDO shrink film lies in its origins and its compostability.

“We’re very excited that it’s not going to be contributing to the landfill, and it’s going to go back into an annually renewable resource,” says Sykes. “We don‘t want to slam any of our other shrink films, because we love them too.  The film will not replace the current films; just add a new dimension to the market.  It is also nice not to be held accountable for contributing to the landfill.”

Flexible packaging operations feature numerous areas where “greening” can be done and often times in a very cost-effective manner. Here is a snapshot of some of the ways converters can be environmentally friendly while still focusing on the bottom line.

Converting and printing on flexible packaging results in one large, expensive, yet necessary problem – scrap. The converting process produces large amounts of scrap, trim and waste materials from plastic films, and often times that scrap is just disposed of. But, thanks to companies like ABC Polymers of Stone Mountain, GA, that scrap can be recycled. ABC can provide comprehensive recycling services including conversion and compounding services, granulating, shredding, densification, baling, elutriation, metal separation and resin transfer. Operations like this convert quality reprocessed pellets to provide low-cost feedstock alternatives compared to prime resin [see UP CLOSE, p.11].

Mahzel Metals of Chicago, IL is another company that buys scrap film, but it actually recycles aluminum foil scrap, plastic coated films, raw foil, lacquer foil, poly foil, and post-consumer foil. Through the use of a proprietary method, Mahzel is able to extract the aluminum and resell it, while at the same time saving its customers money. “We’ve saved a lot of companies a lot of money in landfill costs,” says Don Chaimovitz of Mahzel Metal. “The paper companies don’t want it [the foil], and for the most part the aluminum people don’t want it, so we provide a valuable service.”

Many converters just need balers to contain their waste for disposal or recycling, and those services and machines are available as well. American Baler in Bellevue, OH, specializes in highly efficient balers that optimize bale production and bale density while reducing wire and energy consumption.

One of the more obvious areas of need and application of environmentally friendly technologies in the flexible packaging industry is pollution control and emissions. With the use of various solvents and hazardous chemicals necessary to produce certain types of flexible packaging, cleaning and controlling the emissions before they leave a converting facility is necessary, especially considering environmental regulations.

Anguil Environmental Systems, Inc. in Milwaukee, WI, is one company that provides converters with systems that control volatile organic compounds (VOCs), hazardous air pollutants (HAPs), process odors and nitrogen oxides (NOx). These pollution control technologies capture and destroy HAPs and VOCs, usually by oxidation, which is extremely effective.

MegTec of De Pere, WI, also uses catalytic oxidizers to enhance the chemical reactions that convert VOCs into carbon dioxide and water. The catalyst does not take part in the reaction, but lowers the temperature required to destroy pollutants. The results are lower operating costs and reduced equipment stress. In addition, MegTec offers regenerative thermal oxidizers and recuperative thermal oxidizers that provide even more options.

“There are some real big-time energy savings to be had there,” says Steve Rach, senior account manager at MegTec. “The catalytic units provide a 99 percent cleanup [of the air], which means it’s actually better [for the environment] to use solvents on the press than water-based materials.”

Handling of trim, waste and scrap from various flexible packaging converting processes is an often-overlooked area with regard to environmentally conscience operations. All converters of flexible packaging should be using some sort of air cleaning and waste removal system, if only for one reason: it can cut costs. Bill Titus, sales Manager at AirTrim, Inc., says his company’s pneumatic waste handling systems take the waste matrix, punch-outs, trim, etc., blow it through their systems where it contains the dust, filters the air, and returns the cleaned air back to the building or to the outside atmosphere.

“Our systems frees up floor space because the waste container is not located on the plant floor, and the automated system does not require workers to monitor it, which saves money on labor,” says Titus. “And it also helps increase the quality of the product. Increased quality because you do not have the dust in the air, you do not have to manage the waste at the machine…it is pulled away automatically.

“On the quality side of it, the dust/waste doesn’t get in the air and on the machine, and also the web…so the end-user or the next user doesn’t lose quality in that printing process at the end of it.”

That said, most of the “environmental” benefits are helpful to an oft-overlooked part of the environment – inside the plant. “It increases quality of the products, the safety of the operation, and provides environmental air control,” says Titus.

While treatment and disposal of hazardous chemicals is a key part of the “greening” of the flexible packaging industry, a trend has developed that can reduce or eliminate the need for the treatment and disposal of harsh chemical waste. Companies like Coim and Rohm & Haas are constantly developing and refining the capabilities and expanding the applications where converters can utilize solventless adhesives, thereby greatly reducing the amount of hazardous byproducts resulting from the manufacture of flexible plastic films and packaging.

Solventless adhesives can now be used in foil applications, high-slip films, barrier films, and high-heat or chemical resistance applications. And to increase the eco-friendliness of the operation, solventless adhesives can also be used on PLA films.