Page 14 - Packaging News magazine Jul-Aug 2021

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SUSTAINABILITY | www.packagingnews.com.au | July-August 2021
Colgate brings Smile for Good
recyclable tube to Australia
In an Australian-first, Colgate-Palmolive has launched a recyclable tube for its Colgate toothpaste and is making its packaging technology available to all competitors. Lindy Hughson reports.
ITH 50 million toothpaste tubes per annum sent to land- fill in Australia, the introduc- tion of a recyclable tube is a welcome development from Colgate-Palmolive.
The new packaging tech- nology, developed by global team of Colgate engineers, was five years in the making. The high density poly- ethylene (HDPE) tube is the first of its kind to be categorised as kerbside recyclable under the Australasian Recycling Label (ARL) program run by the Australian Packaging Cove-
nant Organisation.
PKN spoke to Ted Bailey, packag-
ing sustainability manager for Colgate Asia-Pacific about the chal- lenges encountered in the tube’s development.
Most toothpaste tubes are made from sheets of plastic laminate – usu- ally a combination of different plas- tics – sandwiched around a thin layer of aluminium. The mix of materials makes it difficult to recycle through conventional methods.
“Our recyclable tube was devel- oped to remove the aluminum layer and re-engineered the other materi- als to get to a HDPE tube which is comparable with the #2 HDPE recy- cling stream,” Bailey says.
“Identifying the right target recy- cling stream was a critical first step, and – after some early development – we set our sights on the #2 HDPE coloured bottle stream both because of its scale and our ability to develop a viable and scalable squeeze tube into it,” Bailey said.
“Another key challenge was devel- oping the tube to perform in a famil- iar way for users as well as be scalable from a production standpoint.
“HDPE is often a stiff material, but by using different HDPE grades in the tube body we were able to dial in the soft squeeze people expect while using resins compatible with the #2 recycling stream,” Bailey explains.
“Our intent from the beginning was to develop a tube we could scale across our entire portfolio, so a lot of attention was paid to engineering the
BELOW: The new HDPE tube is the first of its kind to be categorised as kerbside recyclable under the ARL program.
tube so that it met our high standards for both performance as a tube as well as production efficiency.”
Toothpaste tubes are an area in which the company is highly verti- cally integrated. Bailey says the Smile for Good tube is fully pro- duced in-house at Colgate’s strategic manufacturing facility in Guangzhou, China. This includes producing the tube laminate and caps, printing, forming, and filling of the tubes.
SHARED EXPERTISE
Perhaps the biggest win for local industry is that market leader Colgate- Palmolive says it will be sharing its tube technology with interested com- panies and competitors.
“Our goal is to make all tubes recy- clable, and we know that is not some- thing we can do alone. Sharing the technology and collaborating across the value chain with toothpaste com- petitors, tube manufacturers, and with the recycling industry is critical to achieving this goal,” Bailey stresses.
The recyclable tube development is another step in Colgate-Palmolive’s ongoing effort to help Australians make small, sustainable changes for the better, including the launch of the Colgate Bamboo Charcoal Toothbrush and its TerraCycle partnership.
The company says Colgate Smile for Good is improving the brand’s sustainability profile to help achieve its global target of 100 per cent recy- clable, reusable or compostable packaging by 2025 and Australia’s 2025 National Packaging Targets. The range also contributes to Colgate’s ongoing work supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy Global Commitment, which aims to accelerate the transition to a circular economy.
Colgate Smile for Good toothpaste can be purchased at all major gro- cery retailers in Australia. ■