artience Holds Successful Test of Horizontal Recycling

=artience group’s Toyo Ink Co., Ltd. conducted a demonstration test of horizontal recycling, in which multilayer monomaterial packaging is stripped off and recycled into a highly transparent film.

The test showed the physical property evaluation results of the film using 30% recycled material are of a practical level.

In this demonstration test, Lipton Tea & Infusion Japan Co., Ltd., Toppan Co., Ltd., and Toyo Ink developed a multilayer monomaterial package that can be reel-and-white, and Futamura Chemical Co., Ltd. molded the film using recycled materials and evaluated its physical properties.

Many film packages have a multi-layer structure using printing inks and adhesives between films made of different materials, such as polyolefins and polyesters. While this combination of different materials enables package designs to ensure different performance requirements for different applications, the difficulty of recycling increases the need for mono-material packaging made of a single material.

By alkali-treating this package, peeling off the film, and debonding off the printed ink, it is possible to extract high-quality recycled materials with high transparency and few impurities.

In addition, artience is studying horizontal recycling, in which recycled pellets are used as film raw materials and returned to the original film, and has confirmed that the physical properties of biaxially oriented polypropylene film (OPP) using 30% recycled pellets are of a practical level of quality.