Page 34 - Packaging News Magazine Nov-Dec2020

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AUSTRALASIAN PACKAGING CONFERENCE 2020 www.packagingnews.com.au | November–December 2020
to pay a higher price for their packag- ing if it meant no more litter. He pointed to the numerous examples where brands were leading the move away from plastic to fibre-based pack- aging, citing Coca-Cola, Carlsberg, and Yakult, among others.
Jasson Mills, R+D manager at the world’s biggest packaging company Amcor, said the company would be either reusing or recycling all its
packaging by 2025. He told the audi- ence that 89 per cent of Amcor’s cur- rent packaging is recycling ready, and that another eight per cent was on the way, with the company yet to work out how to make the remaining three per cent recyclable.
Mills then took the conference into the Amcor digital watermark concept, which essentially fingerprints each piece of packaging. Once the
packaging is post-consumer the waste is automatically sorted, with a camera on the conveyor belt identifying the type of packaging, and the line auto- matically placing the waste in the correct bin. A full nationwide test is scheduled for the year after next, in either Denmark or Germany.
Packaging industry identity Joe Foster said plastic was an essential part of modern life, and the key to sustain- ability was innovation and re-engineer- ing. He pointed out the decision by China to stop accepting plastic waste from Australia meant 581,000 tonnes of plastic had to now be dealt with locally.
Looking to the future Foster said augmented reality would deliver per- sonalised content on packaging, that rigids would swap to flexibles, that compostables were not the answer, and that the barrier to innovation was imagination.
And one final step is very critical: implementing traceability so brand owners are confident the material is
— Barry Cosier, AFGC
recycled.”