PACKAGING WRAP
company was not able to remove the Cellophane, it instead chose to replace it. This included protective seals made from an eco-friendly and compostable solution using FSC-certified wood fibre. To make this sustainable vision a reality,
L’Occitane had to reassess its packing to ensure the boxes were still fit for store shelves. Montésinos says the company performed stringent tests and adapted its folding boxes design to “guarantee the same quality of the product”. She stresses there really is no need to wait to remove Cellophane from product packaging and that it is completely “feasible” for beauty businesses to make the change.
A COMPOSTABLE FUTURE? However, for some brands that rely heavily on gifting, removing the wrapping can prove to be more challenging, particularly around the holiday period.
For this reason, The Perfume Shop (TPS) made the decision to swap its previous polypropylene gift wrap for an alternative substrate, the Natureflex Eco Wrap, in November 2022. Made from wood pulp, a material more commonly used within the food and drinks industry, this new wrap is said to be fully biodegradable and compostable. But how does the alternative material stack up? Futamura, the company which created and supplied TPS with Natureflex Eco Wrap, uses coppiced wood from fast growing trees, such as eucalyptus, as the source material for its product. The wood is pulped and converted to a viscous liquid through a process called xantation, treated and then dried to form the packaging wrap. Joachim Janz, Futamura’s Sales Manager for Germany and Denmark, says the material meets the global standard for composting, meaning it can be composted at home and at an industrial site.
It comes as the use of
bio-based and compostable packaging is predicted to increase in 2023, according to label manufacturer Resource Label Group.
Futamura is confident that the current composting infrastructure in the UK will be able to cope with an increase in compostable packaging on the market. But the challenge then is to ensure that consumers are aware of the special nature of the company’s packaging.
Policy makers and stakeholders need to make sure there is an “adequate collection and labelling system” in place, so that products end up at their “destined end-of-life” – these being industrial compost sites, or a community or home composter. But getting consumers on board might not be as simple as it sounds, says Robert Lilienfeld, a waste expert of 20 years and the President of RL Consulting. He says the issue with compostability
32 January 2023
cosmeticsbusiness.com
The Perfume Shop (below) and L’Occitane (bottom) are among those companies that have called time on traditional packaging wrap
comes down to whether consumers will actually compost the biodegradable materials correctly. “The odds are slim, as many consumers might not know whether the compostable material is any different than a plastic wrap,” he adds. “Therefore, it is probably going to get thrown away.” This can both contaminate the recycling system for plastics, but also lead to the wrapping sitting in landfills for a long period of time. It still can break down, but whatever compost value the material originally had is going to be lost in a landfill and simply generate more greenhouse gases, Lilienfeld explains.
But the bigger issue is the fact that many materials which are biodegradable and compostable are likely to turn into “nothing other than greenhouse gases” in any case, he continues. In the case of wood pulp and cellulose-based products, Lilienfeld says they do have a base level of material that has some value when composted. But, for the most part, it is not a circular solution and not a “significantly better solution” than a plastic overwrap, he adds. “It’s a better marketing solution, but in reality it is not really any better for the environment.”
SAFER ALTERNATIVES
So, what are some of the other packaging wrap alternatives available to beauty businesses? UK-based research and product development firm Xampla has spent the last four years creating a plant-based alternative to plastics and Cellophane. The company was originally formed as a spin off from Cambridge University in the UK, with the initial goal of developing high performance materials made from natural polymers. Dr Marc Rodriguez, Chief Technical Officer, says some of its earliest work was actually based on spider silk. “It is a very interesting material, it is super strong, elastic and requires no chemical modification,” he explains. “It is essentially something that is produced in a low energy process and only requires water as a solvent.” From this, Xampla made the conscious decision to not rely on an animal-based product and instead
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