Liners under pressure
The solid waste legislation passed recently by the Brazilian government (see our Brazil Summit review) is one of the most far reaching in the world, and has put release liner waste under particular pressure. Liner is ‘the new villain of the piece’, commented one leading Brazilian converter. It can no longer be landfilled or incinerated and must be collected and recycled.
The Brazilian industry is faced with having to act fast to comply with the stringent terms and short time scale mandated by the legislation, and it is coming up against problems all too familiar across the developed world where such strategies have been tried: a fragmented industry unable to collect sufficient quantities of liner waste in one place to make collection and reprocessing economically viable; and a lack of commercial facilities for de-siliconizing paper-based liners.
But already the legislation is forcing the development of new ideas and new technology solutions. Local company Celulose Reciclada is investing in new capacity to recycle paper liners from end users in the Sao Paulo region, while Colacril is in the late evaluation stage for technology which turns used filmic liners back into ‘good as new’ filmic release liners.
The lesson is clear: the global label industry must be pro-active in tackling the sustainability issues which surround release liner waste – or governments and global brands will force the pace in ways which may be difficult or prohibitively expensive for the industry to manage.
But sometimes it is only the reality of that legislation which forces the development of new solutions. The example of Brazil demonstrates both trends at work.
3 responses to Liners under pressure
This is a great boon for the makers of film liners at the expense of paper mills, and will definitely put the Brazilian converting industry at a competitive disadvantage.
You are right B G.
We would like to add some information about the new legislation in Brazil forcing liner collecting and recycling in our industry.
Novelprint has developed and has been using BOPP liners for about 40 years now, and has progressively substituted paper liners, so that today 95 percent of its production uses BOPP liners.
The initial driver in the late 1970s was not sustainability issues, but quality benefits such as improved release performance; cleaner, non-absorbent of bacteria; humidity resistance and better no-label-look transparency; and cost benefits such as thinner materials (both liner and face materials); more labels per rolls and less web breakage. In the late 1990s we discovered that the siliconized BOPP liner was easily recycled with other PP materials, and actually fetched a higher price due to the presence of silicone which substituted for other additives used in the recycling process.
The recycled PP pellets are used in many products, from injected small parts to strapping ribbons and garbage cans.
In 2003, Novelprint started a program of buying back and collecting the liner from some customers, which is now receiving a lot more interest due the Brazilian Government’s recent ‘National Plan for Solid Residues’.
In December 2005, Novelprint was invited to make a presentation at the AWA Release Liner Conference in Washington DC on the history of development of BOPP liners, where the buying-back program of the liners for recycling was explained.
The sustainability advantage of BOPP over paper liner starts with the reduction of about 50 percent in weight and, besides the above mentioned benefits, avoiding costly and potentially non-environmentally friendly de-siliconizing chemical processes. We are glad to see this development happening finally in Europe and the USA.