Recyclability. Compostability. Renewability. Walki is building its sustainability platform "Zero Waste Future" on these three pillars. The manufacturer of carton- and paper-based barrier packaging solutions presented its progress towards this goal at FachPack in Nuremberg from 24 to 26 September.
From frozen products and fresh goods to food service applications and non-food articles such as detergents, Walki is constantly developing new, sustainable composite materials for consumer packaging. These include coatings based on renewable raw materials such as tall oil, which is a by-product of cellulose production, compostable coatings and so-called earth coating, which can be separated more efficiently in the paper recycling process. The company's latest development, together with partner Sabic, is the use of circular polymers obtained from plastic household waste. Walki's R&D department is also currently focusing on dispersion technology. "More than 80 percent of our products already consist of renewable or recycled raw materials," explains Annika Sundell, Executive Vice President Innovation at Walki. "Our goal is to offer all our products to be renewable, recyclable or compostable by the year 2030.”
The new developments are part of a comprehensive sustainability platform called "Zero Waste Future", which Walki has established. With this platform, the company aims to develop specific packaging solutions for its customers' products while minimizing waste in a holistic manner - both for food and for packaging waste. The aim is to keep materials in a cycle.
"Our sustainable barriers are in demand in the market, also in comparison to the standard petroleum-based range – every day we practically sell one more sustainable solution," says Sundell. The FachPack exhibition booth of the company based in Espoo, Finland, was correspondingly well attended. "We had numerous promising discussions and the interest in our innovations was enormous," says Annika Sundell. "This proves to us that we are on the right track".
