Working together to unlock sustainable packaging solutions

ES: I’d like to start by looking at the broad picture. What are the biggest sustainability challenges you have faced when developing new products from the perspectives of both Henkel and BOBST?

Nanni Bertorelli: From our perspective, the first challenge is design for recyclability – a big topic for brand owners.

The second challenge is performance – making sure that any new designs match the performance of the previous non-recyclable design. Once we reach a certain performance, it is all about measuring the recyclability and assessing whether the pack is effectively recyclable according to guidelines and regulations, especially in the EU. Last but not least, we come to our biggest challenge: cost.

Once we have a solution that is designed for recyclability and performs well, we have a recyclability assessment in place, and it is safe, we have to ask the question of whether it is sustainable in terms of cost, and how it compares to the cost of the previous solution. The non-recyclable solution may still have cost advantages as it typically comes out of a well-developed supply chain.

Beyond that, the final challenge is the life cycle assessment of all these solutions. We developed very encouraging ones in terms of performance, even better than our initial targets, and we will continue to work on that.

Mauro Bonfiglio: From the perspective of a chemical manufacturer, we see an additional level. For us, legislation can be an opportunity as well as a threat, particularly the upcoming PPWR. For the packaging industry, especially chemical manufacturers, there may be a storm brewing. At Henkel, we are proactively re-shaping our chemicals and raw materials portfolio to be more bio-based and enable recyclability from the start to be ready for the legislation.

ES: What brought Henkel and BOBST together to initiate this partnership?

MB: We assessed the complementarity of our partners to ensure that we can do things better for our customers.

We asked ourselves how to implement overall sustainable value in the market. We assessed the willingness to cooperate and the “muscles”. A global reach is important for market effectiveness.

Both companies are market leaders in their areas and share similar values, so it’s a perfect fit. We believe that the two companies have the right experience, expertise, and acumen to collaborate successfully. Our respective sustainability targets are very well aligned.

NB: We share key elements of our vision, and sustainability is a key pillar. We discovered early on the importance of creating an ecosystem of partners, because we cannot do it alone. We need raw material manufacturers, converters and brand owners, and Henkel is a strategic player.

This led us to build a solid cooperation, which allows us to fast-track solutions that otherwise would take much longer to develop.

ES: How are you hoping to address the challenges the industry faces within this partnership?

NB: We put our cooperation into practice at our competence centres at Henkel and BOBST, where we run trials on new materials and solutions with our technicians and process specialists. We create new structures to reach the right barrier, with substrates that have different behaviours from the ones we used to work with in the past, and this has been a long journey.

MB: We believe that we do not need to invent hot water. Sometimes solutions are much closer than what we expect. We must be simple, clear and transparent.

To give you a practical example: At the supermarket, we saw a pot of candy, a paper carton box with a lid made from laminates. It was a nice design, but the pack was not homogeneous.

What we can do together with BOBST is to reshape this material into a homogeneous material that is more easily recyclable.

ES: Speaking of recyclability, could you discuss the significance of the cyclos-HTP Institute standard assessment and its influence on the development of recyclable packaging solutions?

NB: Having the possibility to make recyclability assessments according to guidelines in an easier, more direct and quicker way has been really important. There is no greenwashing. All our structures have gone through rigorous recyclability assessments.

MB: BOBST and Henkel are not recycling companies, so working with cyclos-HTP was very helpful when it came to answering the question of what recyclability means, and what the methodology is being used for assessing it. We wanted to close this gap.

When we start to develop a new idea, a new coating, or in BOBST’s case a new machine to use our chemistry, we need to understand at the very beginning what types of chemical building blocks we need to use to make the end products recyclable, and how to make the product machinable. Cyclos-HTP helped us to move in the right direction from the beginning.

Launching a product on the market that is already pre-certified and pre-assessed by companies like BOBST and Henkel can give confidence to the market that there is no need to spend additional time and money on further analysis because the job has already been done for them.

ES: What are the key challenges you hope to overcome around developing barrier solutions for flexible packaging utilizing paper and other substrates?

MB: Barrier is one of the areas that the market is so working quite intensively on for cost and sustainability reasons, with the goal to have a more homogeneous material to later be managed, recycled or debonded.

Another reason is to reduce the CO2 footprint impact. Nowadays, there are quite a few barrier coating solutions on the market, mainly for standard materials for standard applications. When we go to high performance it’s still a challenge because the chemistry is not yet available in full. Some solutions on the market are contributing to closing these gaps, and legislation will provide guidance and direction. The PPWR will tell us in a clearer way which chemicals can be used or not for a more sustainable solution. But barrier packaging will certainly be the name of the game in the coming months and years.

NB: We began to intensively work with paper at least three years ago. Looking at the statistics of our competence centre, around 85% of our trials are based on different kinds of paper for different applications, from paper cups to food packaging, and there is high interest from brand owners.

Consumers like paper, they consider it more green and eco-friendly. The recycling stream is quite mature. So, it’s quite easy to close the loop through recyclability, with creation of recycled paper for different uses.

In terms of the performance, paper was a greater challenge compared to mono-material plastic film packages, because of its nature. Clearly, paper has been used for years in packaging, however, barrier properties were not needed.

Adding barrier properties to paper is a big challenge because of its nature, porous and hygroscopic, with no barrier. So, the development of chemistries and application technologies for paper substrates has been a long journey that is not over yet. Developments are ongoing, but we are proud of the results we have achieved so far.

ES: How will you measure the success of your collaboration in the coming years, both internally and in terms of their impact on sustainability?

NB: Most of these developments have been taking years, and there’s still a lot of a lot of work to be done. But when we will see some of the solutions that we developed within our ecosystem of partners on the supermarket shelves, that is a way to measure how effective we were developing these solutions and to help brand owners meet their targets.

MB: I believe that there are good marriages and not so good marriages. Good marriages last forever. The premise of this partnership is a good marriage. I believe that the thermometer of how to judge this cooperation is the customer. They will tell us if they want BOBST and Henkel to work together.

With BOBST I see a company made of outstanding people, not only on a professional but also on a personal level. The cultures fit together very well.

ES: In an optimum scenario, what kind of solutions are you hoping to have developed in the future?

MB: I have three kids, and working for a chemical company, I feel a massive social responsibility for them and their future families.

We went to visit the Red Sea on our holidays one day and visited the desert, and in some areas, you couldn’t see a single piece of sand because it was covered in plastic. That was scary, but not a surprise to me.

My dream is a zero-impact culture. What I aim for is a packaging industry that can deliver recyclable materials. But we cannot forget that recyclability is not only about BOBST and Henkel, it is about the entire industry and population. In big parts of the world, they have other problems than thinking about sustainable packaging.

I also aim for a packaging industry that is biodegradable and compostable and uses new chemical raw materials that are not available yet. These new chemical materials may fit these applications at the performance level needed to replace the fossil-based material. This is a big dream and not something that will happen in my lifetime, but I want to be part of this journey.

NB: I agree 100%. Taking it down one level, there are many projects we would like to work on in the areas of biodegradable packaging and compostable packaging. We need to work on retortable solutions that today are a big challenge in terms of fully recyclable mono-material structures as well as paper and BOPE. These are the topics that not only BOBST, but the whole packaging industry will focus on.