In this Innovation Spotlight, Dow outlines how its extrusion coating portfolio aims to support recyclability requirements and regulatory readiness, and how its collaboration with RDM Group demonstrates how lightweight polymer coatings can extend the use of fibre-based packaging into applications such as frozen food and dry pet food.
Simplicity first, performance always
For over a decade, the packaging industry has worked to simplify structures and move towards maximizing single material solutions. That focus remains foundational to improving recyclability at scale, enabling efficient collection, sorting and reprocessing across existing systems.
But as regulatory pressure increases and performance expectations remain high, one reality is becoming clear: not every application challenge can be met by a single material without compromising product protection, food safety and environmental impact. Too often, circular packaging debates are framed as material trade-offs – paper versus plastic, glass versus aluminium. But this isn’t about winners and losers; it’s about designing packaging intentionally, using materials for their strengths, and enabling circularity by design.
For demanding applications that require barrier performance, durability and product protection, the next chapter of circular packaging will be shaped by this intentional design – keeping structures simple while using lightweight, precisely-engineered functional layers where performance demands it.
Designing fibre-based packaging for the most demanding applications
Think about that takeaway coffee you enjoy. To preserve performance and prevent waste, fibre‑based packaging requires additional functional protection.
For everyday goods like paper cups and cartons, thin and precisely-designed polymer coatings provide toughness, seal integrity and barriers to moisture, grease and oxygen, helping prevent product loss while keeping fibre content high and so improving packaging efficiency, recyclability and re-pulpability.
Such solutions are enabled through extrusion coating, where high-performance innovative plastic resin is applied as a thin layer onto paper or paperboard. The result is a lightweight structure that delivers performance while remaining compatible with established recycling systems.
Dow’s versatile extrusion coating portfolio, including high-performance sealants, tie layer resins and options for enhanced stiffness, toughness or barrier, can also be offered based on renewable (bio‑circular) and circular (mass‑balanced advanced recycled) feedstocks.
These solutions support recyclability requirements, increasingly mandated by regulation, while giving converters and brand owners flexibility to design packaging that balances performance, sustainability and compliance.
Collaboration in practice: fibre-based packaging enabled by functional coatings
Dow’s collaboration with RDM Group demonstrates how lightweight polymer coatings can extend the use of fibre-based packaging into more demanding applications, such as frozen food and dry pet food. The result, Multiboard CirculaRR, combines recycled cartonboard with a thin layer of recycled polyethylene from advanced recycling. It is designed for recyclability and is compatible with mixed paper recycling streams.
This approach keeps polymer content low, allowing fibre‑based packaging to meet both performance needs and end‑of‑life requirements. The same design discipline underpins Dow’s recent collaboration with Elopak and Orkla, where a unique mix of circular (recycled) and bio circular (renewable) polymers is applied as thin functional coatings on paperboard cartons.
Through these solutions Dow helps brand owners expand fibre‑based packaging into new applications while maintaining clear focus on recyclability and material efficiency.
Enabling collaboration at scale: Pack Studios™ and Dow’s role
With more than 60 years of experience in extrusion coating, Dow brings deep expertise in fine‑tuning coatings, barriers and recyclability across a wide range of packaging formats. That expertise is brought to life through Pack Studios™ – a collaborative innovation platform where customers can test, trial and pilot solutions either in person or virtually.
At Dow’s global Extrusion Coating Center of Excellence - part of Pack Studios™ Tarragona - converters, brand owners and material experts can co-develop and validate designs on an industrially-capable pilot coating line. This helps de‑risk development, shorten innovation cycles and accelerate the scale-up of circular packaging, enabling solutions that are lighter, lower carbon and ready for an evolving European regulatory landscape.
Driving the next generation of circular packaging design through material collaboration
Designing truly circular packaging starts with asking the right questions. At Dow, we see extrusion coating as one of several tools that can help translate circularity ambition into practical, scalable solutions – when applied with discipline, simplification and close collaboration across the value chain.
Whether the outcome is a full‑plastic structure, a paper‑based design or a foil‑based alternative, progress depends on a material‑agnostic mindset and shared accountability for balancing performance requirements with recyclability and sustainability.
This content was sponsored by Dow.
