Amcor rolls out cannabis containers with post-consumer content

Want to get high? Treat aches and pains or anxiety?

And want to be sustainable at the same time?

In Canada?

Amcor Rigid Packaging has you covered.

The company is rolling out the company's first-ever cannabis packaging that includes post-consumer content in Canada.

The polypropylene packaging line, created for Crativ Engineered Packaging for sale in Canada, includes 50 percent post-consumer content, said Greg Rosati, vice president of marketing and strategy for specialty containers at Amcor Rigid Packaging.

Amcor already made virgin resin containers for Crativ at its plant in Brampton, Ontario, and spent about three or four months to further develop the line to include packaging with recycled content, he explained.

The challenge was to create a post-consumer blend that would have the same performance properties as virgin resin, an important consideration for the child-resistant packaging, he explained.

Because cannabis use is protected under federal law in Canada and the containers produced by Amcor Rigid Plastics for Crativ are only used in that country, Rosati said there is no legal concerns for the company. But marijuana use remains illegal on the federal level in the United States, even though many states now allow consumption, so the company has no plans to enter that market.

Amcor started making Crativ packaging, which the company markets in Canada, more than two years ago using only virgin resin. The latest move introduces recycled content to that product line produced by Amcor Rigid Packaging, a unit of global packaging company Amcor plc.

"They sell to the dispensaries and to other areas. They do not fill the package," Rosati said about Crativ. "We're basically a contract manufacturer for them."

"I think from our standpoint, it's an interesting product. We believe in responsible packaging, and this is a very effective child-resistant package. It's got a great feature to keep children out of it. I think that was something we certainly do on the health care side, and we felt it was a good fit for us strategically to continue into our child resistant offerings," Rosati said.

The packaging comes in a variety of sizes and colors.

"It was really a big opportunity to get in the market without having to deal with the state legalization vs. the federal legalization and get caught up in all of that," Rosati said.

Package manufacturing takes place at an Amcor Rigid Packaging facility that Rosati described as "very diverse." The company serves a variety of markets at that location, including food, beverage, nutrition and dairy. "A little bit of everything," he said.

Amcor Rigid Packaging hopes to one day produce a line of 100 percent post-consumer packaging for Denver-based Crativ, but that will take some more development work.

"This one in particular was a challenge because of the child-resistant features that require some functioning. The material blend had to be just so that we didn't jeopardize the functionality of the [child-resistant] feature," Rosati said. "We're trying to get to 100 percent [post-consumer] and we will eventually."

"We had to develop a material blend that maintained the functionality and superior performance of our patented child-resistant design," Crativ CEO Bill Ludlow said in a statement.

Rosati believes experience gained through work on the cannabis packaging also will help the company develop recycled-content packaging for other markets.

"This product represents something for us that we think could be applied in other areas. Being a real first for us in PP PCR at this magnitude is sort of the catalyst for more products to convert. Even though it's kind of unique in the cannabis space, we think it's going to be applied to a lot of other segments," he said.