Interview with Dr. Daniele Borin (Taghleef Industries) about BOPP barrier films

Karsten Schröder talks in Berlin to Dr. Daniele Borin, Product Manager for Flexibles at Taghleef, about PP-based film packaging solutions.

Daniele unveiled how BOPP films can be used both as printing and barrier web. In fact EXTENDO® portfolio can meet the most demanding requirements in terms of water vapour, aroma, oxygen and mineral oil barrier.

Discover why this approach with PP-based barrier films supports the circular economy and protects food properly.

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Transkript

I’m here with Daniele from Taghleef and he was talking in his presentation the brilliant one to be honest about OPP and mono material layers. Why do you think OPP is one of the main materials for monomaterial solutions for flexible packaging? Yeah. Thank you very much Karsten for the appreciation of my presentation.

Let’s say polypropylene by actually in the polypropylene is a material that traditionally is used on packaging machines taking all the advantages that polypropylene can bring. We decided to integrate further functionalities on polypropylene. So incorporating barrier, incorporating sealing performance and incorporating heat resistance, so to get the monomaterial solution based on polypropylene from Taghleef or Flexpack. I don’t know exactly. I learned that polypropylene has a good water vapor transmission barrier.

Yeah, but not so good against aroma and oxygen. But you solve this problem, how? Yeah, incorporating barrier, so incorporating specific polymers and specific barriers that allow to implement and complete the properties of quality property land.

Providing also oxygen barrier, better thermal alloys and barrier to aroma. That sounds to me that these barrier, good barrier properties against aroma and of course so oxygen, seems to be the key to be used more in the flexible packaging industry because OPP normally is only used for water vapor transmission, but you know, it opens doors. Yeah, for sure. When you want to move to monomaterial you need in any case to provide functional properties and good product protection.

So of course incorporating barrier is essential to keep the food protection and so to keep the shelf life of the product and avoiding food waste and of course the supply chain changes a bit. If you bring the barrier into your OPP film and the converter buys the ready-made barrier film from you, he does not buy polyethylene film for instance for the sealing layer with barrier. So is this an impact you are focusing on or is it not very important for the converting industry? It’s a change I guess. Yeah.

Our aim is to provide a one-stop shop. Let’s say so in our development, in our portfolio. We are integrating the barrier, but we are also improving the sealing performances. So our final target is to deliver a monomaterial solution that not necessarily needs polyethylene as a solution for the sealing web. And if you are talking about OPP or polypropylene monomaterial, is the sealing layer also polypropylene or could it be polyethylene as well?

And this is that also a mono material solution our main choice our main proposal when we realize that barrier in the polypropylene is not enough for sealability we suggest to use gas barrier polypropylene. And so if not yet enough for the application we could also consider polyethylene. But of course we are not entering anymore in that target of monomaterial, which is still an all living based solution. There’s no impact on recyclability concerning the barrier structure of your external film.

Our extended film art design to be in line with guidelines about the recyclability so that sounds great. Yeah, so you can’t make an OPP film out of it, but you can make OPP regrowers to recycle the polypropylene for other applications, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you’re one of the leaders of OPP films is this only a niche product or is the external product of something you you will sell all over the world target.

Wachstum durch Anforderungen Circular Economy

We are experiencing more and more in the growth of extended because of secular economy requirement the requirement of mono material and so recyclability. Yeah, so we are experiencing a very big demand on this film and this is also confirms the quality of the film and our value proposition. So do you think it’s a worldwide trend to mono materials just a European thing? No. No, it’s going worldwide, right? Yeah. Thanks for this explanation. Thank you very much. Thank you, Karsten. It’s been a pleasure.