SHRINK LABELS

Pat Reynolds of Packaging World magazine has always  something interesting to talk about. I finally got around to the December issue the other day and he was discussing the trend to shrink sleeve labels on plastic bottles. There are lots of advantages to shrink labels. They provide a lot more real estate and can conform to complex bottle geometries; they can combine product surety/tamper evidence with product ID and info in a single component. Top speeds of sleeve applicators have been steadily increasing. Some current machines can run 800ppm or more.

All these are combined to increase their popularity.

But there is a dark side. When plastic shrink sleeves are placed on plastic bottles, it can cause problems in the post-consumer recycling stream. When the bottles with sleeve are recycled, it is difficult to separate the 2 plastics. This mixing of different plastics makes the resulting chips more difficult to reuse.

Fortunately there are some solutions out there. According to Pat several manufacturers such as ExxonMobil and Printpack have introduced new shrink sleeve material that is easier to separate.

If you are using shrink sleeve labels on your plastic bottles, this is something you need to consider.

The article is online at http://www.packworld.com/welcome-back-insider