PACKAGING WOOD & BAMBOO
dropper with a single-piece wooden cap in 2020. The new cap, called the Just Wood Dropper Cap, has no plastic component and uses no glue, just a single piece of wood from sustainable forests, which can be customised in oak, birch and beech natural wood finishes, or painted with bio- varnishes. Quadpack’s Stircea, meanwhile, tells Cosmetics Business to “watch this space” as the company’s technicians have invested extensive research and development time into a new, patented structure “that enables a wooden cap to adhere securely to a bottle with no insert”.
TRICKS OF THE TRADE
Being a natural material, wood offers its own challenges, as Stircea explains. “To work with wood, you need to achieve precise parameters of humidity to maintain dimensions,” she says. “After all, wood contracts and expands with cold and heat. The dryers at Quadpack Wood are carefully calibrated so that the wood achieves the elasticity and softness required for each kind of pack. During manufacture, the temperature at the factory is strictly controlled to stabilise the raw material. We also add a special coating that protects the wood against dimensional changes and also adds aesthetic value.” Further, in terms of aesthetics, the use of wood- turning tables and CNC milling machines means any geometric shape can be achieved. And finishing options are more diverse than one might think, with Stircea noting: “The Quadpack Impressions decoration facility has developed numerous techniques to decorate wood, from spray coating and lacquering to digital printing in incredibly fine detail.”
It is these small details that help elevate wood both visually and from an environmental angle. Cosmogen’s wooden spatula, is another example. Not only does it require just a single manufacturing step, but Lelièvre explains that “even the branding and decoration can be simply engraved into the wood to avoid the use of ink”.
THE NEW BAMBOO
If wood is noble, natural and luxurious, bamboo is its hip younger cousin – favoured by the Gen Z crowd – and the use of this plant in everything from clothing to beauty accessories is growing faster than... well, bamboo.
The industry is seeing bamboo toothbrushes, razor handles, body puffs, konjac sponges, face pads and spatulas popping up to replace traditionally plastic and/or single use products. And these are innovating to become ever more green. Cosmogen, for instance, offers a Bamboo Brush set, which, Lelièvre tells Cosmetics Business, “has been designed without a ferrule to reduce materials”. This, she says, cuts out both aluminium and glue.
38 January 2021
“Bamboo is a very sustainable material as it grows naturally without pesticides or fertilisers and requires little water. Moreover, it captures 30% more CO2
than trees,” says
Maxime de Hemptinne, co-founder of Bambaw, which develops sustainable alternatives to single use items. Bambaw was founded by twin brothers Maxime and Augustin, who’d taken steps to live their lives creating as little waste as possible and wanted to help others do the same. Sturdy and biodegradable bamboo “was the most sustainable material and therefore the obvious choice for manufacturing our products”, adds Hemptinne. Commenting on the company’s bamboo
make-up remover pads, Hemptinne tells Cosmetics Business: “Cotton is a disaster for the environment. It is grown with a massive use of pesticides, fertilisers and water, and all of this for cotton pads to be used once before being thrown away. Unlike their cotton counterparts, the bamboo make-up pads can be reused many times. In addition to the environmental benefits, it also saves money in the long run.
“The problem is similar with razors,” he adds. “Billions of plastic razors and cartridges are thrown away every year. They cannot be recycled, as the metal is embedded in plastic. So, all this plastic is burned or ends up in nature. “To counter that problem, Bambaw’s safety razors are designed to last a lifetime. Only the easily-recyclable stainless-steel blade needs to be replaced, which costs just a few cents. This makes it a much more environmentally conscious choice.”
Bamboo is also a favourite for beauty packaging components with US professional beauty supplies company Qosmedix having launched a new recyclable bamboo cap for its 5g low profile glass jars in November. Again, dispensing with the usual plastic insert, this threaded cap is made from 100% bamboo with no non-removable interior plastic coating. A PE foam liner for added protection is included, but can be removed prior to recycling. Even more recently, Qosmedix introduced a bamboo applicator kit containing disposable make-up applicators, including lip gloss and eye shadow applicators, mascara wands, lip brushes and angled spatulas. The bamboo-handled range offers a more environmentally friendly solution to the ultra-hygiene-conscious product application required during the Covid era. The future, therefore, looks verdant for bamboo, as it swiftly establishes itself as the longer term replacement for items once available only as single use disposables. Equally, with timber ticking so many aesthetic and ethical boxes, this material is likewise primed for success... knock on wood
cosmeticsbusiness.com
Virospack launched the first dropper with a single-piece wooden cap in 2020 (above), while Qosmedix developed a bamboo cap with no interior plastic coating (below)
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