Chicago — For Fresh-Lock, the sustainability journey is incremental. And essential.
So the maker of closures for flexible packaging — think zippers and sliders — continues to push for recycled content in its products, an effort that includes a new project with resin reprocessor Revolution Co.
The idea, said Fresh-Lock's Todd Meussling, is to continue to innovate, bringing the flexible packaging market along in steps as the importance of sustainability continues to grow.
Using recycled content in flexible packaging films is nothing new, but Fresh-Lock wants to systematically, but carefully, push the use of recycled resin in associated closure systems.
At Pack Expo 2024 in Chicago, Meussling, the senior manger of market development for Fresh-Lock, sat down with Tammy Rucker, vice president of sustainable materials at Little Rock, Ark.-based Revolution, to talk about their companies' partnership to advance sustainability in the flexible packaging market.
Revolution is supplying recycled linear low density polyethylene to Fresh-Lock that's now being incorporated into one of the company's zipper products. The recycled linear low density polyethylene accounts for 25 percent of the zipper's weight and is in the flange area of the zipper.
The flange, Meussling explained, is a strip of film attached to the actual raised zipper portion of the closure called a lockset, which has both a male and female side that snaps together. The flange is used to attach locksets to flexible films used by packaging converters.
"Just to start off, we're putting a 25 percent [post consumer recycled content]. This is mechanical [recycling] based PCR," Meussling said. "Right now we're not putting it in the locks because we're learning too. We're all learning and we're all on this sustainability adventure together. And so we're protecting the locks from any type of thing that might take away or compromise functionality," Meussling said.
"But we feel really good about where we all in the flange. And we'll have this run for a while," he said. If the market reaction is good, the company intends to "keep pushing the envelope" and increase recycled content. The recycled PCR is sandwiched between outer layers of virgin resin in the flange in Fresh-Lock's design.
Recycled resin can act differently than virgin resin during processing. So Fresh-Lock, Meussling said, takes a conservative approach to ensure success.
That means taking incremental steps to potentially introducing higher recycled content levels, first proving success at lower levels before moving higher.
"We take a very conservative approach to it. We believe the market is ready to incorporate PCR zippers in addition to their PCR films. We feel like this is advancing that conversation. We really want to make sure that there is success in that whole circularity model," Meussling said.
"We want to be very careful with PCR because we want to make sure it's accepted," he said.
"We don't want any chance of failure," Rucker added.
Revolution hopes Fresh-Lock's work to introduce recycled content into their zipper systems will help promote a wider use of the company's LLDPE into wider markets. Revolution not only makes poly tube used for agricultural, but the company also collects used tubing to create recycled LLDPE. That resin is what the company is supplying to Fresh-Lock, which is a brand of Presto Specialty Products that's owned by Reynolds Consumer Products Inc. Reynolds, known for making aluminum foil, also owns the Hefty brand of food storage and trash bags.
Wider use of Revolution's LLDPE will allow the company to develop additional types of recycled resin. But without market support, those investments cannot be funded, Rucker said.
That's why it's important to promote Fresh-Lock's use of recycled LLDPE and showcase the project as an example of what can be accomplished, she said.
"It's been a good project. This is one of the examples that we've experienced of a company taking in our product and really taking it all the way to a fished launched product and then really promoting it well," Rucker said. "They are really taking a leadership position in the sustainable message."
Rucker said her company is able to provide a consistently performing recycled LLDPE for Fresh-Lock because the material is only made from one source of recycled resin, the used polytube.
"You guys really did a good job of working with us on specifics of what you needed. And we were able to go back and adapt our product to meet your requirements. It was a really close development product," Rucker said to Meussling.