TC Transcontinental Packaging Wins a Gold Award for Sustainability

MONTREAL, CanadaTC Transcontinental Packaging announced that it has won the Gold award for Sustainability with its compostable peanut bag at the 2018 Flexible Packaging Achievement Awards Competition. Developed internally at Transcontinental Ultra Flex, the new flexible peanut bag was designed using certified compostable materials to support arenas and stadiums’ green initiatives and help sports teams, venues and leagues achieve the next level of landfill waste diversion. 

“The chief benefit of the new bag is that it reduces the amount of labor previously devoted to the manual sorting of materials collected during cleanup after games. The economic benefit is the lowering of overall waste management costs for the venue and the environmental benefits of this package center around the use of renewable resources and its easy inclusion into the venue managed composting program,” said Todd Addison, vice president, business development at TC Transcontinental Packaging. “It is a great honor to be recognized by the industry for setting a new bar for packaging sustainability. Our customers can count on us to always look for new materials, new technologies and new techniques to create brilliant packaging that meets today’s consumer needs.”

The new compostable peanut bag replaces the current laminated polypropylene bag that has become steadily barred from stadiums, thereby eliminating a classic game-day menu offering, according to TC Transcontinental Packaging. The company now offers an alternative made of two-layer adhesive lamination consisting of certified compostable materials. The print and barrier layer is NatureFlex, a cellulose-based product from Futamura USA and the heat-seal layer is composed of ecovio, a compostable biopolymer from BASF. One of the challenges of this structure was in the adhesive lamination of the two plies, which was overcome with the Epotal product line, also from BASF, a compostable water-based adhesive that allows the packaging to pass the ASTM Standards it needs to be considered compostable. The inks are fully tested for ecotoxicity and the graphics are reverse-printed using standard flexographic printing technology. Finally, the bag shows printed verbiage to help consumers understand that it is compostable as part of the venue composting program.

To date, the introduction of this package is through specific Aramark venues where its composter has verified the compostability of the package, according to TC Transcontinental Packaging.. The packaging is shipped to filling plants in rollstock for vertical form-fill-seal machines.