Procter & Gamble Oral Care has unveiled its newest packaging innovation across its leading toothpaste brands, Crest, Oral-B and Blend-a-med.
This innovation increases the level of recyclability of its toothpaste tubes, as part of the P&G Ambition 2030 commitments of achieving 100 per cent recyclable or reusable packaging.
Crest, Oral-B and European brand Blend-a-med will start the switch in January 2021 and continue until full conversion by 2025.
Toothpaste tubes are used by millions of consumers every day; however, its multi-material construction poses a challenge for recycling facilities around the globe.
The solution to this is the HDPE – High-Density Polyethylene – tube, which provides the same product protection as current tubes, and which has been certified by North American and European recycling bodies to be compatible with existing recycling technologies.
These HDPE tubes can be recycled where collection programs exist.
To introduce the right solution and make its toothpaste tubes more sustainable, Procter & Gamble is in discussions with several HDPE tube suppliers and has already reached an agreement with Albéa to start using its proprietary Greenleaf Generation 2 tube technology, which enables the tubes to be recyclable wherever collection schemes are active.
Greenleaf Generation 2 tubes are recognised by the North American Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR) as well as RecyClass and SUEZ.circpack in Europe and can be recycled within the existing, effective HDPE bottles recycling stream.
To earn APR recognition, it was demonstrated that the toothpaste tubes could be converted into quality post-consumer HDPE resin, and then reused to make new plastic bottles.
RecyClass is an independent cross-industry platform that assesses material recyclability and provides specific recommendations on how to improve packaging design to fit current recycling technologies in Europe.
The platform certifies that Procter & Gamble’s ‘toothpaste tube’ technology is considered to be compatible with HDPE recycling.
Moreover, it certifies that both Procter & Gamble’s ‘toothpaste tubes with cap’ product will not have a negative impact on the current European HDPE containers recycling.
