“Plastic Free Paper” for food product packaging – Lactips

The Lactips launches Plastic Free Paper: the first paper packaging solution free from plastic or controversial substances and fully recyclable and compostable. 

Innovation developed in collaboration with the eco-organization CITEO to rethink the world of packaging while ensuring complete control over their end-of-life, food preservation, and food safety.

Plastic Free Paper: the only coating solution to replace plastics and chemical treatments for sealable packaging papers, a barrier to oxygen, fats, and mineral oils.

Plastic Free Paper is adapted for industrial use for food and non-food applications.

Lactips, the French company specializing in producing a 100% bio-sourced casein-based plastic element that is biodegradable in water and home compostable, must develop a solution for paper or cardboard packaging to strengthen the protection and conservation of food products without affecting their recycling. Paper packaging solutions, which are frequently popular with manufacturers, essentially due to their appeal to end consumers, often contain adjuvants that limit their recyclability or prevent biodegradability. The 

Lactips has developed a first-generation Plastic Free Paper to allow manufacturers an innovative solution for sustainable, high-performance paper or cardboard packaging.

Paper packaging solutions are frequently influential but often at the expense of their recyclability.  

Besides a recycling rate of around 74% in 2020 in Europe, supported by the effective collection, ordering, and recycling channels, paper is a material wholly aligned with a circular economy strategy.

Though, on its own, it cannot be used for food packaging as it is permeable to water, oxygen, and even fats. In conclusion, paper is often used in conjunction with plastic materials, sometimes metalized to protect products.

Those plastic coatings make recycling the paper more complicated, generate virtually impossible waste to sort and end up implying incinerated or sent to landfills.

Particular grease-proof food papers are treated with per- or poly-fluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), which, due to these compounds moving into food products, have been flagged as a health uncertainty by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in a statement announced in 2020.

Denmark has now banned PFAS in paper and cardboard since 2020. Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway have regularly declared plans to present a proposal to the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) by July 19, 2022, to restrict PFAS.

Plastic Free Paper, the 1^st generation of biodegradable and recyclable packaging

the Lactips has developed, with help from the eco-organization CITEO, a new cellulose matrix coating solution that guarantees the total recyclability of papers and cardboards. This first-generation joins the report with the thermoplastic produced by Lactips to meet the challenges relating to performance capabilities and sustainable improvement.

100% bio-sourced, hometown compostable, and heat-sealed, the Plastic Free Paper solution gives the oxygen, fat, and mineral oil limits essential for preserving food products and is entirely compliant with food contact standards.

Tests brought out with Centre Technique du Papier (CTP) in France, and Papiertechnische Stiftung (PTS) in Germany have verified that there is no impact on the recyclability of the papers and cardboards for the first two applications available:

• Replacing the sealable plastic layer for non-food packagings, such as mailing films or food films for dry or fatty commodities (tea bags, confectionery, pet chews, etc.)
• Replacing per- or poly-fluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) for papers that require to be grease-proof (e.g., fast food packaging)

The Plastic Free Paper explication offers a natural alternative for manufacturers (processors and brands) in the context of their environmental struggles and the application of the European directive restricting single-use plastics (Directive 2019/904/EC). The material developed by Lactips is not plastic. Still, a natural polymer, following European Regulation no.1907/2006 (REACH), is therefore exempt from the demands and restrictions set by this directive.

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