August 2022

The International Circular Plastics Flagship Competition is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and delivered by climate change charity WRAP.

It has announced the award of £1.2 million funding to six UK-based innovators to work with international partners to tackle plastic packaging waste challenges in:

India
Chile
South Africa
Kenya

PepsiCo, one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies, aligned with its strategic transformation, PepsiCo Positive (pep+), which puts sustainability at the heart of the business, and with the global goal of achieving Net-Zero carbon emissions by 2040, announces use of UBQ™ material. The material, developed by the Israeli startup of the same name, will be used in the creation of a sustainable pallet that includes unsorted household waste – including organics – in its composition.

The new TexSeal™ Eco Pouches are an innovative, earth-friendly paper-based packaging solution suited for today’s market. TexSeal™ Eco Pouches are what protection packaging should be all about – protection for customers content and protection of the environment.

Paper packaging solutions are taking over functionalities that, in the past, could only be handled by plastic. Made from renewable forest products, TexSeal™ Eco Pouches offer a reliable, quality paper-based packaging solution.

Product Characteristics

Launched this week in major retailers across the country, the new cardboard packaging is said to be fully recyclable and easily added to a household paper waste collection.

If all Ariel Pods plastic tub users switched to the new cardboard box, it could save up to 6,500 tons of plastic a year in Europe, according to P&G.

The Ecoclic box is made with 70%+ recycled fibres while Ariel Pods are produced with zero manufacturing waste to landfill.

A comprehensive experimental study of how more than 200 different flexible packaging samples behave in the most common optical sorting process generated concrete insights and will drive design recommendations for the flexible packaging sector – with CEFLEX stakeholders getting first access to insights from September 2022.

A majority of DASANI bottles in the United States—from 20-oz. and 1.5-liter singles to 10-oz. and 12-oz. multipacks—will be offered in 100% recycled plastic* rolling out this summer. In Canada, this innovation spans all DASANI bottles. The shift supports both DASANI’s pledge to remove the equivalent of 2 billion virgin plastic bottles from production by 2027 compared to 2021 levels and the company’s World Without Waste goal to use at least 50% recycled material in its bottles and cans by 2030. 

Good data—and lots of it—is key to making artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) production, inspection and packaging systems work without a hitch, plus well written algorithms to analyze the data and make decisions that will help people and machines function more intelligently. In fact, 3-D vision systems are usually the “eyes” robots use to guide them as they sort and package products or load pallets—3-D because it provides much more data to make intelligent decisions quickly.