BioPak, KM Packaging Services, and agriculture company Costa have come together to create a pack for Woolworths’ sweet berry truss tomatoes.
The pack uses 90 per cent less plastic than a conventional APET clamshell punnet and combines BioPak’s home-compostable sugarcane tray with KM’s K Peel printed lidding film. The pack is heat sealed using a Proseal GT1s-Max automatic inline sealer, according to a statement from KM Packaging.
Richard Fine, founder, product developer and sustainability director at BioPak, told PKN the project took some research and development to get the design right.
“Ultimately, it is replacing a PET tray with one made of moulded sugarcane pulp fibre. It’s home-compostable, as well as recyclable in the paper stream,” he said.
“The trays needed to fit into the existing standardised crates. They also needed to be able to de-nest easily and accept the top film.”
Fine pointed out that the trays are made form renewable resources and are carbon neutral.
According to a statement from BioPak, if 50m sugarcane trays were composted at home, the emissions offset would be equivalent to driving a car around the world 93 times.
