4 minute read
Safe personal care packaging with recycled plastics
from Norner News 2024
by Norner AS
Packaging plays an important role in protecting products during transport and storage, ensuring hygiene and safety for the product to the consumer. Orkla aims to expand the use of recycled HDPE and has engaged Norner in a project to develop knowledge and strategies to ensure quality.
Orkla Home and Personal Care has long been engaged in the development and implementation of packaging solutions with better sustainability and environmental profiles. An important measure is to use recycled plastic in their packaging. A challenge with this is that recycled plastic often contains contaminants that can cause odour, weaker material, and unsafe substances that can leach into the product. Orkla has received project support from the Retail Environment Fund to establish relevant specifications for the use of recycled HDPE for Orkla's personal hygiene products, conduct tests to document the safe use of such, and approve relevant rHDPE suppliers. This work will be done together with Norner Research AS.
The project will deliver solutions for how recycled HDPE (rHDPE), which meets the purity requirements for primary packaging of personal care and cosmetic products, can be used in such contact-sensitive packaging. rHDPE materials are often not good enough to meet the requirements of the cosmetics regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 - which allows the use of recycled materials - as long as safety is documented. CosPaTox (see fact box) has published its guidelines, and we will use these recommendations.
The project will, among other things:
• Gather information from industry and research to establish test and analysis methods
• Test and evaluate rHDPE materials from various recyclers
• Carry out screening analyses and target analyses of substances in the materials.
• Evaluate strategies for analysing the substances, e.g. directly on pellets or bottles.
• Evaluate strategies to minimise migration risk from cosmetic packaging through blends or multilayer packaging of rHDPE.
• Test whether the physical performance of bottles meets the technical specifications.
Norner Research's role in the project is to contribute with plastic and packaging competence, analyse substance composition, bottle testing and production of prototype bottles.
EU's PPWR
Norway and the EU's ambition is to increasingly recycle plastic packaging and recover this plastic so that it can be safely used in new packaging or other products. Progress has stagnated, and the authorities now want to further accelerate this. EU has a new regulation underway known as the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR). This will introduce new and stricter requirements for recyclability, the use of recycled material, packaging minimisation, and reuse of packaging. There will also be an eco-modulated fee on packaging to promote this.
Migration analysis shows that the rHDPE materials contain other substances than virgin HDPE. These substances fall into three categories:
• Odour components from previous content like soap or cosmetics.
• A small amount of food contact-approved additives in the materials and some derivates of these.
• Occasionally, some phthalate compounds are present.
About CosPaTox
The cosmetics industry has formed a consortium: CosPaTox (cosmetics, packaging, and toxicology). The goal is to understand and establish safety standards for high-quality recycled plastic materials (PCR) for cosmetics, personal care and household detergents. This resulted in a guideline for analysis and safety assessment. The recommended testing includes
• Migration testing on pellets or packaging with screening analysis of all substances
• Specific analyses for hazardous substances such as PAH, PAA, Bisphenol, Dioxins, and Heavy metals
Norner has established several of these new methods and is working to validate more. These methods will also be used in Orkla's project.
The article is written by Jorunn Nilsen and Ole Jan Myhre, Norner.
