O F Packaging has received the diamond award at Dow’s recent 2021 Packaging Innovation Awards for its Brookfarm’s curbside recyclable, high barrier stand up pouch.

The diamond awards is the top prize at the awards, which honours packaging projects from around the globe, showcasing the very best in sustainable innovation. It has run for 33 years and saw 189 entries and 36 shortlisted finalists.

O F Packaging won the accolade for this curbside recyclable, high-barrier stand-up solution as it is an innovative packaging solution that answers a longstanding question – how can we recycle flexible packaging through curbside recycling schemes?

O F Packaging was given a challenge by its client Brookfarm – to create a high barrier packaging structure to protect its muesli and granola that can also be recycled through curbside recycling schemes.

Flexible packaging is typically not easy to recognise by material recovery machines and hand picking such materials becomes difficult. After 12 months of hard work with its partners PREP Design and Results Group, the diamond award winning Roll ’n’ Recycle packaging became a reality, allowing consumers to transform the empty, 100 per cent Polyethylene packaging into a 3D shape suitable for their home recycling bin and enabling it to be recycled.

How exactly does it work?

After finishing their breakfast, the empty semi-rigid granola pouch gets rolled into a cylinder by the consumer, and the product label takes on a second life as a sticker to keep the new shape of the packaging. And the rolled up pouch can be dropped into the recycling bin ready for curbside pickup.

O F Packaging, part of the ASX-listed Close the Loop Group, said it was an honour to receive highest the award.

Its managing director and Close the Loop Group CEO Joe Foster said, “I am very proud to receive this accolade and there was a lot of work done to get to where we’ve got. To get recognised for this award is quite amazing for our company here in Australia.

“It’s a very interesting product – it’s a rolled product from a stand up pouch in a flat format. We found that before this innovation, when consumers put this product into the bin, it was getting picked up as paper and moved into the paper recycling stream, contaminating the paper.

“The fact that we can roll it into a cylindrical 3D shape allows it to be separated and sorted into the plastics stream, and therefore recycled with all the other plastic materials.

“After trialling different shapes and morphs, we found that the 3D shape, when put into the recycling facility here in Australia, picked up as a plastic component and got separated correctly and not confused as paper.

“This way, we’re creating a full circular economy where the product can go back into some form of packaging at end of life.”