Reduce reuse recycle replace

Plastics are an important part of modern daily life. The excellent properties, performance and economics of plastics mean they have become the material of choice in our modern society, playing a crucial role in everything from safe food packaging to medicines and vehicle exteriors.

Yet it’s clear that plastics pose production, disposal and clean-up challenges, and that when it comes to sustainability the “reduce, reuse, recycle, replace” approach has been a slow process.

Milliken is helping to change this with sustainability through chemistry, and purposeful collaborations with more than 30 organizations that are already contributing towards a plastics circular economy. We work closely with trusted partners across the industry to develop the infrastructure and technologies towards circularity as well as developing additives to make plastics more reusable, recyclable and efficient.

Reduce

Reducing the resources used to make the essential plastic products we need today, including raw materials inputs and energy consumption, is an important focus across government and industry. Addressing these challenges, the European Union, for example, has the most comprehensive plastics strategy in the world related to the environmental sustainability of packaging, aiming to support the vision of a smart, innovative and sustainable plastics industry.

One Milliken innovation helping to reduce resource use is UltraGuard™. UltraGuard Solutions slow the transmission of oxygen and moisture in high-density polyethylene (HDPE), improving its barrier performance by up to 50%. This can result in lighter-weight products and reduced material use. These additives can help enable the use of more mono-material film products, while also reducing the weight in thick-walled HDPE pharma bottles by up to 20% without sacrificing protection against light and moisture.

Another example of Milliken’s chemistry for sustainability contributing to this goal is Millad® NX® 8000 ECO for polypropylene (PP). It delivers crystal-clear glass-like clarity while offering faster production rates, and average energy savings of 10% in the production of injection molded clarified PP parts. Its success in promoting energy-efficient operations means that brand owners using PP clarified with Millad NX 8000 ECO can display the highly desired UL Environmental Claim Validation label on their injection molded parts. The additive is also recognized by the Association of Plastic Recyclers in the US and RecyClass in Europe for its compatibility with plastic packaging recycling.

Hyperform^® HPN^® for injection molding also helps to reduce energy use. This family of additives, designed for use in PP homopolymers and ideal for food packaging with enhanced optics, can be used to resolve production issues that converters may encounter with traditional nucleators, such as shrinkage, warpage and the tradeoff between stiffness and impact performance. By increasing the resin’s crystallization temperature and rate, Hyperform® HPN® aids processing, boosts productivity and enables injection molders to save energy, which can reduce carbon emissions, by lowering cooling and cycle times. These energy savings have been independently verified by UL.

Whilst these additives are advanced solutions we are only at the beginning of the R&D journey which will evolve as we continue to develop and implement new ideas and technologies.

Recycle  

As consumers demand more sustainable packaging, we have aimed many of our technical innovations, partnerships, and policy contributions at enhancing recycling, improving the recyclability of packaging, and upgrading recycled content.

From a policy perspective, Milliken is involved in the collaborative efforts of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, GRPG, and The Recycling Partnership’s Polypropylene Recycling Coalition. These organizations are doing essential work to ensure that any recycling solutions are broadly applicable, widely adoptable and that the appropriate infrastructure is in place to keep the packaging out of the landfills and environment.

In addition, Milliken is supporting the HolyGrail project that has brought together brand owners, retailers, recyclers, packaging producers and sorting technology providers from across the plastics value chain to investigate ways to improve the sorting of post-consumer plastics. After successfully developing a basic proof of concept around the promising technology of digital watermarks, HolyGrail 2.0 has achieved a significant milestone.

Test results show that the digital watermark technology can achieve more granular sorting of packaging waste at scale, such as developing separate food and other new Post Consumer Resin (PCR) streams that currently do not exist, for example for cosmetic or detergent applications. Industrial-scale pilots are due to start this year. The technology has the potential to open new recycling streams, effectively overcoming the limitations of current near-infrared (NIR) sorting technologies and driving a true circular economy for packaging.

Our additives are also enabling next-generation recycling solutions. Milliken has a close partnership with PureCycle Technologies, which employs a patented recycling method to restore virgin-like quality to recycled PP resin. This technical and supply relationship with PureCycle is an extra step towards solving the plastics' end-of-life challenge.

UltraGuard Solutions don’t just enable lightweighting and a reduction in resource use. By improving the barrier properties of HDPE film by up to 50 percent, UltraGuard Solutions enable more mono-material construction of popular products such as stand-up flexible pouches and tubes, making them ultimately more recyclable. One recent example is the development of a more sustainable, mono-material laminate with high-density polyethylene (HDPE), for use in packaging tubes targeting cosmetics, toothpaste and other personal-care applications. Produced using Huhtamaki laminates optimized with UltraGuard Solutions it is approved by RecyClass as being compatible with recycling contributing towards accelerating the circularity of HDPR containers in Europe.

Milliken’s R&D focuses on both extending product shelf life and advancing circularity by enabling the use of more recycled content. DeltaMax^® Performance Modifiers for recycled PP, for example, are concentrates that enhance the physical and flow properties of recycled polypropylene (rPP). By creating a base resin with improved impact and melt-flow properties, DeltaMax enables more recycled content to be added to a PP blend without compromising overall performance.

Reuse and Replace   

Reducing plastics by avoiding single-use items and reusing as much as possible has been described as the best way to avoid plastic waste. It also can be an effective strategy to reduce CO₂ emissions.

Increasingly, global corporations such as Coca-Cola, Unilever and Proctor & Gamble are launching pilot projects on reusable packaging programs. In February 2022, the Coca-Cola Company announced a goal of 25% of all its beverages globally to be sold in reusable or returnable packaging by 2030 to promote a circular economy. 

Starbucks has various initiatives globally that contribute to the company’s goal to create a cultural movement towards reusables by 2025 by giving customers easy access to a personal or Starbucks-provided reusable cup for every visit. In South Korea it is committed to eliminating all single-use cups from its stores by the same year – already four stores in Jeju and twelve in Seoul have ditched all disposable cups in November 2021 and all stores in Jeju has been using reusable cups currently. Starbucks estimates in the first three months of the changeover more than 200-thousand cups were diverted from going into landfill in November 2021.

Replacing existing packaging with suitable, more sustainable alternatives is another strategy for reducing plastic waste and carbon emissions and growing the circular economy.

In Taiwan, Milliken has teamed with the South Plastic Industry Co. Ltd., a leading Asian manufacturer of thermoformed plastic food packaging. The company’s aim was to replace oriented polystyrene (OPS) in ready-meal packaging. Using Millad® NX® 8000, the two parties have produced an UltraClear™ PP resin that delivers on all the performance promises for ready-meal packaging. By using Milliken’s additives SPI is able to thermoform products at a lower processing temperature, reducing energy use and emissions, as well as producing a thinner PP lid without affecting rigidity, in turn helping to reduce plastic usage while increasing output.

Milliken plans to continue to increase production capacity for Millad NX 8000 to meet demand due to its inherent sustainability due to the energy and carbon emissions savings it helps to generate. The clarifier also allows manufacturers to replace high-density resins such as PC, PS and PET with lower-density PP to reduce costs, weight, carbon footprint and help the environment.

More broadly, Milliken has joined a cutting-edge industry initiative GO!PHA, that aims to drive the adoption of polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) biodegradable biopolymers in single-use packaging applications. We bring to GO!PHA our expertise in polymer nucleation to help improve the processing, performance, aesthetics and other important attributes of PHA with a goal to expand the application range of this family of materials into more packaging applications.

In our resource-constrained world, these chemical and policy solutions are helping to address mega-trends such as sustainable supply chains and consumption, as well as climate change through energy savings that lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions. At Milliken we will continue this journey to help achieve the four ‘Rs’ – reduce, reuse, recycle, replace – for people and our planet.