SCALING REUSE WITH EFFICIENT GLASS PROCESSING

For many brands glass is a critical part of their brand identity. A packaging solution both protecting the product and conveying premium quality.

Brands using glass will be aware the cost of virgin glass is sky rocketing mainly driven by energy costs associated with production. Glass is wildly recycled but crushing it, sorting it and reprocessing means that recycled glass is still hampered by elevated costs.

Glass is fragile and to overcome this bottles and jars are produced with thick wall sections. These thick wall sections mean often the pack is unaffected by it’s initial use meaning once cleaned the same pack can be reused.

Again have developed an energy and cost effective way to process glass removing single use elements such as colors and labels leaving the bottle ready for a second life.

ARNE.STUDIO partnered with Again and the worlds largest labels suppliers (UPM Raflatac, Avery Denison, Herma) to validate the effect on removal of the combination of face stock and adhesive. This understanding supported the development of a energy efficient label removal process as well as producing a ‘label matrix’ which can be used to guide brands to make the transition from hard to remove labels to easy to remove labels while still supporting their exiting filling environments. 

In addition to this work ARNE.STUDIO also investigated removal solutions of other residual single use materials such as residue left from conduction film sealing.

A critical part of  reuse is tracking and here too ARNE.STUDIO partnered with Again to developed a proposal for marking virgin bottles and reading bottles which have already been processed. This tracking allows brands to understand the long term lifecycle of their packs.

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