Laminates (plastic)

With their light weight and limited use of materials compared to alternative solutions (e.g. soup in a pouch instead of a can), laminates often achieve good scores in life cycle analyses (LCA) in terms of their environmental impact. However, the vast majority of laminates cannot be recycled.

Considerations when using laminates

Advantages

• Laminates are lighter than alternative materials with similar properties.
• Laminates can be designed specifically to provide the necessary barrier, e.g. water vapour and oxygen.

Drawbacks

• With their various layers of different materials, laminates are hard or impossible to recycle in the current sorting and recyclingsystem, unless the different layers consist of the same type of material.
• Due to improper waste separation, laminates containing vacuum-deposited aluminium can end up in the plastic packaging waste stream, where they can disrupt the recycling process.

Raw materials

Laminates can consist of different combinations of materials:

• Different types of plastic (e.g. PET/PE or PE/PA);
• One or more layers of plastic with aluminium (alu/PE) or other high-barrier layers (EVOH, SiO);
• Multiple layers of plastic made from the same type of material (e.g. PE-LDPE-PE);
• Recycled material in the laminate (e.g. PET-rPET-PET);
• Paper/cardboard with plastic (e.g. cardboard/PE) or with aluminium.

Applications

Since the (barrier) properties of laminates can be specifically tailored to the intended application, the material is used in many different ways. These include:

• Flow wraps (e.g. for cookies)
• Bags with PET
• Bags with aluminium (e.g. for potato chips or coffee)
• Pouches
• (Bread) bags with a see-through window
• Trays with (resealable) lids
• Flexible trays (e.g. for pre baked bread rolls)

Waste phase

Separating a laminate's layers and processing them individually is a very difficult and costly process. Thus far, there is no financially viable method with which to recycle laminates while preserving the materials’ quality. Furthermore, turning recycled materials back into raw materials is a technically complex process, especially for new films or laminates. The often extremely thin layers can only be made with homogeneous raw materials; any imperfections pose a problem for the production process.

The different materials used in laminates can disrupt the recycling processes and negatively impact the quality of the recyclate. This is partly the result of the different types of plastic that are used, each with its own melting temperature. At the moment, only pure PE film is recycled into new plastic film. In the best-case scenario, other flexible materials - including laminates - are processed in a mixed stream of materials. The residue is incinerated with energy recovery. Although the mixed stream can be used for the production of new products, these cannot be thin-walled products such as flexible materials/new laminate packaging materials.