Recently, the Japan Broadcasting Association reported that the well-known Japanese beverage manufacturer "Itoen" began to sell a non-standard beverage bottled green tea drink through online and offline retail stores. A box contains 24 bottles. The plastic paper with the logo is no longer wrapped around the bottle, but the trademark logo is retained on the bottle cap, and other legally announced information is printed on the carton. In addition, Itoen intends to collect some consumer feedback first, and then promote non-standard plastic packaging bottles to other company products.
In recent years, "economy of face value" and "face-seeing age" have become popular terms, and beautiful outer packaging has become an important publicity point in beverage and other industries. The plastic bottled beverages that can be seen everywhere are usually wrapped with a layer of plastic paper printed with product information, advertisements and other logos. Nowadays, even more effort is being made to enhance the "value" of the packaging. "Meng", "High cold", "Small freshness" and other packaging "values" have become one of the important purchasing criteria for consumers.
However, as more and more brands establish brand concepts that protect the environment and support sustainable development, they have begun to adopt plastic-free beverage bottles.
Ascoke: The online retail company "Ascoke" has launched a 2 liter unlabeled bottled drinking water. The bottle will be lighter than before due to less plastic. According to Asokele, more and more companies now sell unlabeled plastic bottled tea or coffee products through its platform. Some of these products use a convex-concave design on the plastic bottle body, and some just stick a small piece of colored sticker under the bottle mouth, and the bottle body is no longer as colorful as before.
Evian: Evian, a mineral water brand, has launched a "renewable bottle". According to the Evian brand, this innovation took the company nearly two years. These "renewable bottles" have a capacity of 400ml, the body is made of polyethylene terephthalate (rPET), and the cap is made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and oriented polypropylene (OPP). All three materials are typical recyclable plastics. Moreover, in addition to using environmentally friendly materials, Evian has also made an innovative treatment for the plastic paper labels on the outside of the mineral water-all labels on the bottle have adopted embossed micro-labels. In other words, without a label, Evian engraved the product information directly on the bottle.
We are all talking about plastic recycling, so how exactly is a plastic bottle recycled? In fact, many plastic packaging is a mixture of several plastics. Due to the uneven viscosity range and irregularities, it is difficult to recycle them. Taking PET bottles as an example, most of the beverage bottle trademarks are made of PVC. During the sorting process, the density of PVC and PET are the same, which greatly increases the difficulty of sorting and handling.
Therefore, in the plastic bottle recycling process, the first thing we need to do is plastic sorting. The discarded plastic bottles will be transported to the sorting station for sorting and packaging, pressed into bottle bricks and sent to the recycling plant. The sorting process can divide a beverage bottle into 3 parts. Among them, the bottle body part can realize the level conversion of "bottle to bottle". After recycling, it is still food grade and can also be used for beverages. However, bottle caps and labels are not acceptable and need to be removed before being processed in other ways. The last to enter the recycling plant is mainly PET beverage bottles.
From this perspective, the "invisible" beverage bottle packaging label will undoubtedly further realize the unity of packaging materials, avoiding the increase in the difficulty of recycling PET bottles due to the difference between the label material and the bottle material. However, many people questioned that once there is no label, a lot of effective information will not be quickly obtained.
As a consumer, are you more willing to support "label-free" from an environmental perspective or are you more willing to buy beverages with "high-value" packaging?