Ultimate Packaging awarded IPL’s 2018 Sustainability Award
Last year, Ultimate Packaging began working with International Procurement and Logistics (IPL), to help Asda supermarket deliver on its pledge to reduce plastic by 10%.
Ultimate aimed to deliver sustainable packaging solutions, while maintaining quality, machine efficiency and shelf life of the product. As a result of this work, IPL have awarded Ultimate with the IPL sustainability award 2018.
Ultimate first focused on Asda’s own brand potatoes and onions, and managed to reduce the film thickness from 27um LDPE to 25um LDPE, making a plastic reduction of 60,000kg a year. The new packaging is on the shelves now.
“Working alongside our strategic supply partner Ultimate we have delivered significant packaging weight reduction within the Asda potato category, reducing cost and making improvements to our supply chain. Overall this is a very positive and pleasing result,” said Darren Surry, senior manager – GNFR and packaging at IPL.
Ultimate has also worked on Asda’s King Edward potatoes to reduce greening and extend shelf life from 4 days to 9 days, making a drastic change to reducing food waste.
“Continuing to down-gauge to these thicknesses provides a technical challenge, however with the multilayer formulation we have developed with our suppliers we have reduced the thickness by 7.5%. With the knowledge we have gained we will continue to reduce further and introduce the technology in other applications,” said Adam Bolsover technical manager at Ultimate Packaging.
