Page 43 - Packaging News Jan-Feb 2020

January-February 2020
www.packagingnews.com.au
PLASTICS & BIOPLASTICS
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pal architects of the single-use directive. “Biodegradability is seen by too many people – and that includes politicians – as a silver bullet. It isn’t; nor should it ever be taken as a licence to litter,” he says.
Accounting for 14 per cent of all biodegradables, PLA is set to be a sig- nificant beneficiary of the swing towards a compostable solution says EuBP conference chairman and Total Corbion senior marketing director Francois de Bie.
“The continuing buoyant demand for PLA has encouraged us to bring on a further 40,000 tonnes of lactic acid production at our Rayong plant in Thailand. Hitherto, we’ve been outputting Luminy PLA resins at about one-third of the plant’s total 75,000 tonnes capacity. We now an- ticipate this doubling by the end of this year, and reaching full capacity in 2021/2,” says de Bie.
It takes about 1.3 tonnes of lactide to produce a full tonne of PLA resin. While the main feedstock is renew- able, non-GMO sugarcane sourced locally in Thailand, Total Corbion is
Biodegradability is seen by too many people... as a silver bullet. It isn’t. Nor should it ever be taken as a licence to litter.” – Werner Bosmans, EC
also starting to draw upon post-con- sumer PLA waste, which it has the facility to chemically recycle at the plant. One unanticipated bonus could be an improvement upon an already impressive life-cycle analy- sis (LCA) assessment.
“We have zero CO2 footprint at the point at which the PLA leaves the factory, and are aiming at a negative balance of almost minus 1000gms CO2/kg. If we’d used 5-10 per cent of post-consumer recycled PLA as feedstock for our LCA, that negative balance would have been even great- er,” says de Bie.
Among an increasing number of enterprising flexible packaging converters pushing the compostable solution is Polish-based Silbo, which according to development manager Marcin Śpiewok has halved its output of fossil-based plastic by us- ing a range of alternatives including cellulose; PLA; BOPE; and fully compostable netting.
“We would like to become 100 per cent sustainable; the question is when. If we did it today then unfor- tunately we would not survive. But what we definitely are now doing is not to offer any multi-layer solutions made of different materials. Even if it’s a laminate using three or so layers, they’re the same material,” Śpiewok says. “We believe that fully compostable single-use packaging will be excluded from the directive going forward as it extends to incor- porate additional flexible applica- tions. It is not possible that we just get rid of plastic packaging. It is not possible that we extend the SUP directive so far that everything is included. We simply have to find the right set of solutions.”
DROP-INS AND OUTS
Within the non-biodegradables sec- tor, capacity has been impacted adversely by a down-turn in the production of bio-PET, reports EuBP MD Hasso von Pogrell. “Two compa- nies with a capacity of producing 450,000 tonnes of bio-PET only produced 60,000 tonnes last year. Whereas it used to account for over 25 per cent of the drop-in sector, bio-PET is now below 10 per cent, and is predicted to fall to a six per cent market share by 2024,” he says.
TOP TO BOTTOM: European Bioplastics forecasts that global production of bioplastics will increase from 2019 to 2024. Just more than half of bioplastics produced are biodegradable, and 53 per cent is used in flexible and rigid packaging.