Berry launching closures with 25 percent recycled content

Berry Global Group Inc. is launching a series of closures containing a minimum of 25 percent post-consumer recycled material.

Brian Hunt, executive vice president of consumer packaging at Berry, said the offerings will cover 30 items.

"That's what I mean by a portfolio," he said during an interview with Sustainable Plastics following a keynote presentation for Plastics News' Plastics Caps and Closures 2020 virtual event.

The items include a range of different types of products, including hinged flip-top closures. Berry is working with two partners to ensure a consistent and reliable supply of raw material based on post-consumer waste, he said. Both of the partners supply materials from curbside recycling.

While initially the portfolio will be available in black only, by 2021 the company is confident that it will be able to offer the products in color, "which I think is going to be important for the broader market acceptance," Hunt noted.

The recycled-content portfolio fits within the company's ambition to focus on increasing the sustainability of packaging.

"Via lightweighting, via the institution of post-consumer material, and by creating partnerships with closed-loop systems," Hunt said.

Among the most important issues in the plastics industry are the need to reduce plastic waste and, more generally, greenhouse gas emissions, he added.

Ensuring recyclability is key, he said.

"Having products all made from a single material is more conducive to recyclability, establishing closed-loop systems so we can get more post-consumer material back into the stream, and the recognition of the value of that material across the value chain, to me, those are all inextricably linked and comprise the most important problem to solve in the caps and closure space," he said.

"For me, that's pretty straightforward: The more recyclable product we put into the market, the greater the opportunity to reintroduce that post-consumer usage, which is obviously where those closed-loop systems come in. But the reduction of emissions is an important element as well.

"When we think at Berry about our efforts, we are focused on both of those things: the reduction of plastic waste and the reduction of greenhouse gases," he said.

Lightweighting addresses both these issues. But how light can the industry go?

"In my keynote, I challenged the group," Hunt said. "As an industry, we should target a reduction of 10 percent for caps and closures over the next two years. That's doable. One thing that is fair to say: Plastic is a robust and versatile substrate and on occasion, we surprise ourselves about how much weight we can take out of a package and still maintain the intended functionality for the intended application."

He described, for example, how Berry had launched a family of wide-mouth deep skirt closures — traditional continuous thread closures — that were as much as 25 percent lighter than the previous design. The new designs allow for more parts in a box, which means more parts in a truck, and hence less transportation, less fuel, lower emissions for the same number of parts to be shipped to the customer.

Berry also has worked on the development of a tethered-cap solution. The thinking is that if the caps are attached to bottles, fewer will end up as plastic litter in the environment. Tethered caps will become mandatory in the European Union by July 2024 at the latest.

"It's driven in a regulatory sense in EU, but the need exists regardless of the stimulus," Hunt pointed out. The tethered product solution developed by Berry is a variant of existing perfected tamper-evident closures for several different neck finishes and several different applications.

Going forward, sustainability will remain a priority, with Berry continuing to lightweight its products, eliminating as much material as possible from the stream.

"Less material going into the market means less potential waste," Hunt said.

The company is also exploring new types of material in a number of developmental projects. Importantly Berry will continue to focus on the need for high-quality post-consumer material.

"The higher and more consistent the quality, the higher the percentage of post-consumer material we can integrate into our parts," Hunt said. "We are not going to stop at 25 percent. We want to get to 50 percent and then 75 percent and beyond. And as we continue to work and engage with our partners, I feel confident in saying we'll have ever more high quality of post-consumer material," he said.