France offers biosourced solutions for cosmetics

The year 2011 is a milestone for the cosmetics packaging industry, says cosmetics industry consultant William Hitchon, with new green-sourced resins now becoming available on the beauty market.

“The main innovation is a thermoplastic resin, called Gaïalène,” he says, “made from a non-food resource grown in France, and usable for extrusion blow moulded bottles, injected parts and film multipacks.”

Gaïalène is a trademarked range of thermoplastic resins (gaialene.com), produced using plant sources by Roquette – based in the north of France, a global leader in the processing of renewable agricultural raw materials, specialising in the starch industry.

“This new generation of plastic obtained from starch, 50% minimum biosourced, has the characteristics of polyolefins,” continues Hitchon. “Its main benefits are numerous: local farming, no GMO, recyclability, much better carbon footprint. The more oil prices increase, the more the up-charge is reducing.”

The Gaïalène resin also enables the manufacture of 40 micron thin shrink film for multi-packing solutions, such as Ceisa Packaging’s recently launched Green’Core (ceisa-packaging.com), made from 20% plant-based material derived from wheat.

“France has one of the most advanced food industries, linked with clusters (IAR, Plastipolis, MAUD) and research institutes (INRA, IFMAS) of worldwide repute,” says Hitchon. “There are proven synergies between the food industry, plasturgy and the packaging sector, areas where France has a leading role.

“In the family of polyolefins (see box), thermoplastic PE Green resins have been introduced into the cosmetic market in 2011, resins made from 100% cane sugar ethanol (braskem.com) which have identical mechanical and aesthetic properties of the by-products obtained from crude oil.

“Other thermoplastic resins, ‘bio-PET’, should soon be used in cosmetics packaging. These resins, blended up to 20% or 30%, are on the shelves today for bottled liquids such as water and soda. Being only available from a restricted number of suppliers worldwide these materials meet marketing objectives of brands keen to highlight sustainable practices.”

There are other advantages for packaging manufacturers, says Hitchon: “These new vegetal plastics materials do not change production rates, so tooling can be used in similar conditions,” he says.

“Biosourced plastics have sometimes been controversial upon their ecological impact versus plastics derived from crude oil. At present of the French environmental labelling initiative, life cycle analysis (LCA) of bio-sourced materials will demonstrate their positive impact on climate, air, water and biodiversity.

“Within the first half-year of 2011, vegetal plastics have gathered the attention of packaging professionals during exhibitions such as PCD in Paris, SINAL in Châlons, Interpack in Düsseldorf and FIP in Lyon.

“The (French) Union of Chemical Industries’ objective for 2017 indicates that for France renewable resources should represent up to 15% of chemical specialties – an incentive for the cosmetics industry (febea.fr, colipa.eu) to demonstrate their pioneer role in making durability a reality.

“It’s well established that green renewable resins will create new categories of green materials opening large perspectives for the plastic packaging industry,” he concludes. “These new vegetal plastics should help in sustaining the increase in consumption of cosmetics and beauty products.”

Polyolefins: the facts

Polyolefins is the collective description for plastics types that include polyethylene – low density polyethylene (LDPE), linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) – and polypropylene (PP). Together they account for more than 47% (11.2 million tonnes) of Western Europe’s total consumption of 24.1 million tonnes of plastics each year. Polyolefins are produced from oil or natural gas by a process of polymerisation, where short chains of chemicals (monomers) are joined in the presence of a catalyst to make long chains (polymers). Polymers are solid thermoplastics that can be processed in two ways – by film extrusion or moulding.