The Netherlands-headed Avantium N.V., a leading company in renewable and circular polymer materials, has announced that it has signed a conditional offtake agreement with US-headed Plastipak Packaging, Inc. (Plastipak), a world leader in the design and manufacture of high-quality, rigid plastic containers for the food, beverage, and consumer products industries.
Plastipak Packaging, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Plastipak Holdings, Inc., supplies many of the world’s largest consumer products companies.
According to the agreement, Plastipak will purchase the 100 percent plant-based, recyclable polymer PEF from Avantium’s FDCA Flagship Plant for use in beverage and food packages in the United States.
Plastipak is driven to develop circular solutions that protect the environment and meet its customers’ exacting standards for sustainability and performance.
Over the past year, the company has been actively involved in evaluating the application of Avantium’s polyethylene furanoate (PEF), a 100 percent plant-based, high-performance polymer that can be recycled in existing polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recycling streams.
Superior barrier properties
PEF is for instance included in the Critical Guidance Protocol from the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR), one of the most universally accepted measures for assessing recyclability in plastic packaging design.
Plastipak has successfully demonstrated the enhanced performance of PEF in monolayer and multilayer bottle applications.
PEF is distinguished by its superior barrier properties, which extend the shelf life of food and beverages, its higher mechanical strength that allows for less material, and its lower processing temperature which reduces energy consumption compared to traditional plastics derived from fossil resources.
PEF’s unique characteristics make it an ideal monolayer packaging material and also provide benefits when used in conjunction with PET.
In multilayer PET packages, PEF serves as an effective barrier layer to ensure product shelf life when a single PET layer is insufficient.
Validate commercial scale utilization
Plastipak, in collaboration with Avantium, is now set to further validate the use of PEF in Plastipak’s food and beverage packages on a commercial scale in the United States market.
As a leading producer of plastic packaging, we are keenly focused on reducing the carbon footprint of our products and at the same time maximizing our resource efficiency. PEF helps enable our strategy to introduce sustainable and innovative materials and products to the market, said Matthew Franz, Chief Operating Officer at Plastipak Packaging.
Recently the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Food Contact Notification (FCN) approval for the use of Avantium’s PEF in food contact articles.
We are delighted with the success of the cooperation with Plastipak, making PEF available for monolayer and multilayer packaging for beverages and food in the United States. Plastipak represents an important part of the market for containers for food and beverages, personal care products, and household products. With this conditional offtake agreement with Plastipak, Avantium can further scale and build the PEF value chain, said Tom van Aken, CEO at Avantium.
