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Creating True Sustainability
Strong, lightweight, transparent and highly versatile, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic is the ideal material for consumer packaging. Yet one of the traits that makes PET equally valuable to brand owners is its tremendous potential for the PET recycling process. Creating sustainable packaging materials solution requires brands, packaging designers and manufactures to produce PET packaging that works in harmony with the PET recycling process, especially the sink/float washing process. The Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR) suggests choosing packaging materials that conform with its APR Design™ Guide for plastics recyclability, including labels that float in water, inks that don’t bleed and adhesives that don’t disperse on the PET regrind.
Reduce Waste with CleanFlake™ Technology
Now, converters are able to offer brand owners a new way to differentiate their products and enhance sustainability. Avery Dennison CleanFlake™ Portfolio of labeling solutions significantly improve the rPET yield in the PET recycling process while maintaining the shelf appeal that pressure-sensitive labels are known for. Pressure-sensitive labels typically limit PET recyclability into food-grade rPET due to adhesive contamination. However, CleanFlake™ technology cleanly separates in reaction to the caustic bath, leaving no adhesive residue on the PET flake.
Conversion Information
In addition to the choice of substrate, APR guidelines can be impacted by the application method, printing process, graphics and the label converting process. It is recommended to test ink systems for suitability with the APR guidelines without negatively impacting the converting and finished label quality. To ensure clean separation between the label and the PET flake, the final (print+label+adhesive) layer must have a total density of less than 1.0.
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