Arriving at Tokyo Big Sight to attend the 30th edition of TokyoPack with 70,711 other visitors, I was looking forward to seeing how many new packaging innovations were being launched in Japan.
As I walked into the first crowded hall, I knew that somewhere in the 720 exhibitors were some stand-out packs, and I had three days to find them. The packaging that I saw was a sea of contrasts; from soft plastics and pouches to premium packaging for gifting, moulded paper, and fibre alternatives to intuitive and easy to open designs.
A category-specific Product Stewardship program that I discovered hiding in the sea of stands at TokyoPack was the new pilot project for consumer recycling of Mayonnaise Bottles between two competitors – Kewpie and Ajinomoto.
The initiative has been designed as a category-based Product Stewardship program between Kewpie and Ajinomoto to encourage consumers to bring their mayonnaise bottles back to the assigned away-from home collection points to be recycled.
An additional objective of the collaborative project is to collate data and knowledge from both companies to better understand how to recycle mayonnaise bottles and to be able to design future technologies to implement horizontal recycling in Japan.
In Japan used mayonnaise bottles are classified as ‘burnable waste’ and as such are not typically recycled. The new program is designed to take the used bottles, reprocess them, and put the material back into future mayonnaise bottles. The Product Stewardship program will then enable recyclers to have access to quality feedstock of PE bottles to ensure that they can develop and cleaner recycling stream for
the material.
The Kewpie and Ajinomoto horizontal recycling trial is being run in Tokyo and I look forward to seeing the Product Stewardship Program expand into other parts of Japan.
This important collaborative program is a part of the Japan Clean Ocean Material Alliance, which is referred to as CLOMA. CLOMA is a multi-stakeholder industry program where companies across the entire value chain can work together to reduce the volume of plastic waste in the waterways and environment.
CLOMA also encourages the development, manufacture and use of more circular and sustainable plastic materials that offer a lower environmental impact in the country.
The CLOMA initiative aims to bring competitors together from the same category to collaborate on recycling, but to also advance and improve horizontal recycling of all plastic packaging in Japan, which in turn will ultimately reduce the number of plastics in the waterways and the environment.
An earlier project under the CLOMA initiative was launched in Kobe City on June 30, 2021, and is known as the Kobe Plastic Next Refill Pack Recycling Project. This project sees collaboration across Kobe City, retailers, brands, and recyclers to challenge the notion of designing ‘horizontal recycling’ (film to film) in which refill packs such as Kao, Kose, P&G Japan, Unilever Japan, and others work together to create viable recycling solutions for difficult to recycle packaging materials.
The Attack Zero ‘Okaeri’ refill pouch is one of the achievements from this program, whereby a horizontal recycling program has been developed for soft plastic refill pouches for Attack Zero’s liquid detergent by Kao.
The program takes used refill packs collected from the public, and other sources, and using a technology developed by Kao for film-to-film recycling, reprocesses the materials into future refillable pouches.
To recycle the refill packs, Kao have focused on utilising the properties of polyethylene, which makes up about 80 per cent of the composition of refill packs, which means reducing impurities coming from PET, nylon, aluminium foil, and ink.
They have also removed refill packs incorporating aluminium foil from the product stream at the sorting stage. Kao aims to move to a recycle-ready mono material in the future with a higher level of recycled content used in the new
refill packs.
The ‘Okaeri’ refill pack was developed in collaboration between Kao Corporation, Lion Corporation, Fuji Seal Co, Ltd, Mitsui Chemicals Inc, Prime Polymer Co. Ltd and Tosoh Corporation. The 6x companies have proven that a collaborative approach can create a successful technology for
refill pouches.
After three days at TokyoPack I walked away recognising that there are many packaging technologists in Japan working towards redesigning packaging to lower environmental impacts. The transition to fibre-based alternatives is also great to see and I am keen to see more advancements in mono material packaging and recycle-ready designs in the future.