Growth Stories

BioWare® comes to Australia

The 21st century’s busy lifestyle is well supported by the plastics industry. Prepackaged foodstuffs, long-life storage, single-use utensils and so on, all contribute. But they can also use up valuable oil resources and contribute to the world’s garbage problems, joining millions of tonnes of other wastes in municipal landfills, with little hope of degrading into harmless and useful nutrients to feed future generations of plant life.

With a growing number of environmentally aware consumers looking for products that reduce impact on the environment, leading plastic packaging manufacturer Huhtamaki Australia Pty. Limited is committed to taking the initiative. Not only does the company develop products and processes which support such objectives, but it also encourages industry partners to work together to bring collective improvements to sustainability and waste stream management.

The answer to this, and so many of life’s problems, lies in technology advances. Huhtamaki has taken a leadership position by recently launching an exciting new range of high quality biodegradable and compostable food packaging products known as BioWare®. The product range includes clear containers for fresh produce, cups, plates and cutlery. A biopolymer known as polylactic acid is the primary material used to make most of these products. Biopolymers are a new class of materials manufactured from crops such as corn. Their use in BioWare® means that these products are all made from renewable resources rather than traditional petrochemical-based plastics.

To effectively and efficiently process today’s biodegradable polymers, highly specialised additives are generally required. Multichem, a business unit within the Nuplex Specialties Group, has a strong ongoing supply relationship with Huhtamaki, and is also the exclusive Australasian distributor for Swiss company Sukano Products Limited. Sukano manufactures a range of high quality specialised additives for particular niche sectors of the plastics processing industry, including the novel use of polylactic acid-based polymer as a packaging material.

The Sukano products supplied by Multichem specifically met the processing challenges confronted by Huhtamaki in the development of the new BioWare® range, providing solutions to enhance physical appearance, processability and mechanical properties.

The current BioWare® range is only a taste of good things to come. Ongoing development work involving Multichem and Sukano will enable improvements to be made to these innovative products, opening the way for them to be used in more applications. Huhtamaki will build on this new technology, expanding their product range and growing their presence in the food packaging sector.