When Australian skin care company Ego Pharmaceuticals conceived its new etchðos range, sustainable packaging design was at the heart of the brand concept, leading to the development of the country’s first 50 per cent recycled content and lightweight rHDPE bottle for skin care. Lindy Hughson spoke to the packaging team behind the project.
Family owned and operated, skin care product manufacturer Ego Pharmaceuticals is an inspiring Australian success story. The company was established in 1953 by husband-and-wife team Gerald and Rae Oppenheim, a chemist and nurse respectively, who saw a need for products to restore and maintain healthy skin. In the laundry of their suburban Melbourne home, they developed Ego Pine Tar Bath Solution, later called Pinetarsol, which remains one of Australia’s most widely used topical inflammation treatments today.
We could say the rest is history, were it not that the story is very much still unfolding. What started as a backyard business is today a thriving global producer of a comprehensive skin and health care range for sale in Australia and around the world. Still manufactured in Melbourne, Ego’s well-known brands include QV, Aqium, Dermaid, Egoderm, Soov, Azclear, to name but a few. The company has staff in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as subsidiaries in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom.
High quality skin care developed with integrity and backed by science are the pillars of product development at Ego, and this ethos extends to its packaging, where sustainability principles inform and guide the packaging design choices. This has resulted in a range of products that are not only made to high quality pharmaceutical standards but are sustainable and ethically produced.
When the new etchðos product range was on the NPD drawing board, Ego’s packaging projects manager Simone Thomassen and packaging technologist Nicholas Rodgers sought to push the boundaries with a breakthrough development that would support the brand story: primary packaging incorporating post-consumer recycled (PCR) content, with a refill solution in the mix.
Consumer insights informed the approach. Market research undertaken by Ego revealed the target audience wanted “convenience” and “Australian made” choices that could “maintain the environment for future generations”.
“We as the packaging projects team had to address these key consumer insights,” Thomassen says. “Consumers are feeling guilty about the amount of plastic going to landfill, and the impact of their product choices on the environment. At the same time, busy consumers want easy skin care solutions, and they also want to buy in bulk.”
Thomassen and Rodgers identified that using PCR material that could be recycled again would address the environmental concerns, while creating a 300ml display pack with a 1L refill pack would meet the convenience and bulk purchasing requirement.
“We considered the entire life cycle of both bottles. An evaluation of reusing a smaller bottle in the home and transporting a larger, higher volume bottle to retail stores for customers to purchase showed this to be the more environmentally friendly solution,” Thomassen says.
A BROADER SUSTAINABILITY STORY
Beyond the recycled content aspect of the design, the team had broader sustainability objectives.
“Both bottles will also be fully recyclable again through mechanical recycling,” Rodgers adds. “The pump can be used multiple times with the same bottle as it is refilled from the larger 1L packs, although at end-of-life pumps are disposed of in the bin.”
Rodgers says Ego opted for the 300ml bottle to be screen printed (by Bardcorp) to reduce the need for additional material, and to add to the shelf appeal in store and at home.
The cap, sourced through Salient, a division of Pact Group, is made from polypropylene and can be recycled along with the bottle, as verified by the APCO online PREP reporting tool.
The larger bottle is labelled front and back with a wood-based polyethylene film made from paper production residue, supplied by UPM Raflatac. This renewable polyethylene film offers a sustainable alternative to fossil oil-based film and marks the first use of this material in Australia. The labels are printed at CCL’s facility in Chirnside Park, Victoria.
Another important aspect of the structural design concept was the flatness of the bottle.
“The flat design is intended to improve space utilisation on a pallet, increasing transport efficiency,” Thomassen explains. “More products on pallets leads to fewer pallets being moved around, and less trucks on the roads to move the pallets. All of this adds to the wider sustainability work at Ego, such as our complete overhaul of our HVAC system, and water and energy reduction projects.”
The etchðos bottles are filled at Ego’s production plant in Braeside on its Serac filling line. And once filled, akin to other Ego products, the bottles are shipped to the market in cardboard outers from Echo Cartons using 60 per cent recycled cardboard.
BREAKING NEW GROUND
With the design brief in hand, in March 2020 the Ego team presented bottle design concepts for the etchðos brand launch to packaging supplier Pact Packaging, a division of Pact Group.
As any packaging technologist worth their salt will know, when incorporating recycled content in packaging, there are structural and aesthetic factors to be considered. The aim in this case was to achieve 50 per cent PCR content, using food grade rHDPE sourced primarily from kerbside collection of milk bottles and food containers in Australia.
Jane Westney, marketing manager at Pact, picks up the story: “From the original design Ego briefed to Pact, we were able to lightweight the 300ml bottle by over 20 per cent, by drawing on all our technical resources. With polymer scientists, hard-wired technical engineers, and operational know-how, we managed to deliver Ego the bottle they asked for but at a much lighter weight.”
The bottle is produced via extrusion blow moulding. While this is not a new technology for this packaging format, the challenge lay in combining 50 per cent recycled resin with virgin resin while maintaining product integrity.
Pact Packaging invested in new blending equipment for virgin and recycled resin, and new extrusion tooling at its Dandenong South, Victoria site.
Colour matching was also an important consideration for 50 per cent rHDPE, especially in the skin care category where packaging aesthetics on shelf count.
“Recycled resin has a slight ‘tint’ as it is not as ‘pure’ as virgin resin. To achieve the white colour Ego requested the process required multiple trials of different levels of masterbatch to achieve the desired result,” Westney explains.
From concept to commercialisation, the project has taken 19 months, with the bottle now in full production at Pact Packaging’s Dandenong South, Victoria site.
“We were breaking new ground here, with the inclusion of recycled resin, new lightest-weight bottle designs, and matching to colour. We were drawing on multiple experts across the business and consequently, time was probably the biggest investment in trials to achieve the right outcome for Ego,” Westney says.
Ego is the first skin care brand Pact has worked with in the Australian market to include 50 per cent rHDPE in their packaging, according to Westney, who notes that Pact is encouraging other brand owners to start their journey to forge ahead with their packaging obligations to achieve recycled content.
Consumers have demonstrated clear preference for the inclusion of local recycled content in packaging. Pact Group commissioned a study through Quantum to understand consumer attitudes towards waste and recycling. It showed that consumers want to know that the materials that they place in recycling bins are reprocessed locally and made into new products.
Brand owners are working towards their 2025 National Packaging Targets. While 2025 might seem a while away, as Westney points out, it takes technical expertise, trials, and time to transition to recycled content.
“The time to start working towards them is now,” she stresses.
The team at Ego strongly concur. By taking this step to use recycled content in its packaging, Ego Pharmaceuticals has paved the way for other manufacturers to follow suit on the important journey towards a circular economy for plastic packaging in Australia.
This article was first published in the January-February 2022 print issue of PKN Packaging News, p16.
