Green innovations drive the future of packaging

THE PACKAGING industry is under pressure to design greener products in order to help consumers meet their own sustainability targets. Joint initiatives, development of technologies in plastics recycling for food-safe containers, weight reduction and downgauging of films, as well as the creation and application of new materials, and technologies such as track and trace, all make the task of reducing impact on environment easier for manufacturers and their customers.

For the period between 2020 and 2025, the green packaging market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.7%. In 2019, the market reached USD 237.74 billion, according to Mordor Intelligence, and the figure will climb to $313.93 billion in 2025, as industries show more proof of their commitment to achieve a circular economy.

David Mo, business development manager at Glory Charm International 

Glory Charm International Ltd was set up in 1994 as a HK base company and has two production facilities in Guangzhou, China for manufacturing both induction heat seal liners as well as PE foam gasket, offering tailor-made liner sealing solution services to achieve customers’ requirement in mainland China, Asia Pacific and Europe.

Glory Charm offers both one piece easy & clean peelable, two pieces tamper evidence and PE foam co-extrusion primary liners which are being sealed to plastic container and glass bottle filled with foodstuffs, beverages, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, agricultural chemicals, health tablet and lubricants.  “A liner is a small piece, but has big value,” said David Mo, business development manager at Glory Charm.  It helps products prevent leakage, extend shelf-life, safety and be more consumer friendly.

“We are working with great effort on a more sustainable future by providing green liner solutions to the customer / brand owners, on how to make a new generation of green packing.” When it comes to re-design, small modifications are just as significant as any big one: size, shape, material or processing changes are after all meant to help a company and its stakeholders reduce packaging waste, become sustainable and lower their manufacturing costs. But food and beverages manufacturers also expect re-designed packaging to maintain their product’s integrity.

Glory Charm is of course complying with the dictates of the trends, Mo said. And when it comes to innovative packaging, apparently less is more.

“We are developing our green liner according to our market’s requirement. We have several projects that focus on how to use one piece of clean peelable liner to light weight the bottle, skip and temper ring, minimise the closure torque, and so on.  The objective of all these is to reduce both plastic waste and carton emission.”

Although the plastic is reduced, the whole packing provides utmost protection with seals. There is no compromise here, said Mo. “We are presenting how to use our foil liner to keep the same leak protection (maybe even better protection), product shelf life but less plastic for the same bottle.  The easy peelable liner will not stick any foil/plastic residue onto the bottle mouth so that it can be recycled completely,” he explained.

Aside from the induction foil, the Glory Charm product family includes GloryFoam, 100% co-extrusion polyethelene foam liners which do not involve solvent.  They are 100% PE, a material that is widely and easily recycled.  In order to match most of the food and cosmetic customers’ sustainable development direction, we are also developing a PP foam gasket to match with most of the PP closures for full set recycling.”  

The company has well developed a one-piece half-moon tab liner called ‘GloryTab’ which is a totally unbreakable tab on top for easy peel off. This new generation tab allows size without limitation from small edge to big tab opening. Aside from these, using the GloryTab liner is all cleanable peel without residue contamination onto the bottle.  It can make sure the bottle can be sent for recycling cleanly when liner peel off.

Recalling 2020

According to Mo, Glory Charm’s factory operations made a speedy recovery in the second quarter of 2020.  “We took all the necessary action to keep our people healthy and safe and to maintain our manufacturing capacity and meet the rapid increase in demand for packing of disinfectants and hand sanitizers.  It helped improve our business and sales in the third quarter of 2020.” It took the company from February to May to recover from pandemic-related setbacks last year.

“February and March were the most difficult months as we did not have enough labour to run factory operations.  The masks and all necessary equipment sources for daily use were also a challenge to procure. We ran at 40% capacity in February but then improved from 40% to 100% capacity in May as we conducted employee training and necessary disease prevention process step by step.”

And business lessons learned? “That risk management is very important. For example, we have to have back-up plan for necessary raw material sources, and it is better to develop these key sources from different regions like Asia and North America. Otherwise, even if you have two sources but they are all located in the same region, you face the same supply challenges,” he said.

Glory Charm has three sales offices, two production facilities located in Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Shanghai respectively. The company is offering one stop liner production solution equipped with lamination, co-extrusion, slit and punch machines to supply liner tape width and pre-cut discs for the past 26 years, operating more than 5 billion closure liners annually mainly to serve China market and exports its produce to customers located in nearly 20 countries worldwide.