Label-free plastic bottles

**Key challenge**

Substantial societal and industrial efforts are underway to reduce single use plastic waste, particularly from plastic bottles, to address environmental concerns such as climate change. Equally, as part of that challenge plastic labels should be recycled, reused, or reduced. These contribute to plastic waste but are vital as they decorate, inform, and provide serialisation and anti-counterfeiting marks.

Currently, plastic labels can be eliminated or reduced by printing directly on bottles or applying thinner labels, respectively. Unfortunately, the former can cause ink-removal issues in the recycling process, and the latter does not eliminate but merely reduces plastic content.

This project presents an alternative technology that could provide a label-free solution which decorates and informs, is readily recyclable, and does not contribute to plastic waste.

**Addressing the challenge through disruptive innovation**

Laser-active chemicals, which are colourless until exposed to laser energy, could offer a bottle decorating process that does not involve labels or inks, and critically contribute zero to plastic waste. These chemicals can be incorporated at very low concentrations (so are expected to have little impact on recycling) in the first stage of bottle manufacture, simply by mixing them with the other bottle forming components. The bottles can be filled and capped in the normal manner, and by applying a laser pattern of variable design, the laser-active chemicals become coloured, revealing the desired decoration and information; there would be no need for any label.

This concept has been analogously and successfully adopted for plastic items such as bread tags and medical devices but has not yet been applied industrially to plastic bottles. Given one leading soft drink brand produces 3 million tonnes of plastic packaging a year and plans to continue to use plastic bottles, within a global label printing market of $40B, the potential value of this disruptive innovation is huge.

**The objectives of this project are: -**

* Develop innovative laser-active chemistry for plastic bottles
* Create bottles containing laser-active chemicals
* Laser-image the formed bottles to impart decoration and information.
* Conduct recyclability and full testing trials of the finished laser-imaged bottles.

**Benefits this project will bring**

* 100% elimination of printed plastic labels
* Significant reduction in single use plastic waste content
* Elimination of conventional printing processes, including solvents, inks and label waste.
* Reduction in energy usage
* Increased supply chain efficiency
* Decreased transportation
* Improved recyclability of printed packaging