TC Transcontinental Packaging has earned the Gold Award for Sustainability for its compostable peanut bag at the 2018 Flexible Packaging Achievement Awards Competition. Developed internally at Transcontinental Ultra Flex, the new flexible peanut bag was designed using certified compostable materials to support arenas and stadiums’ green initiatives and help sports teams, venues and leagues achieve the next level of landfill waste diversion.

Peanuts packaged in the bag were sold at the Kansas City Chief's home stadium in 2017. 

This award celebrates TC Transcontinental Packaging’s commitment to sustainability, especially to ecodesign, as it strives to design products that take into consideration the environmental impacts of the product during its entire lifecycle.

“The chief benefit of the new bag is that it reduces the amount of labor previously devoted to the manual sorting of materials collected during clean-up after games. The economic benefit is the lowering of overall waste management costs for the venue and the environmental benefits of this package center around the use of renewable resources and its easy inclusion into the venue managed composting program,” says Todd Addison, vice president, business development at TC Transcontinental Packaging. “It is a great honor to be recognized by the industry for setting a new bar for packaging sustainability. Our customers can count on us to always look for new materials, new technologies and new techniques to create brilliant packaging that meets today’s consumer needs.”

The new compostable peanut bag replaces the current laminated polypropylene bag, which has become steadily barred from stadiums thereby eliminating a classic game-day menu offering. TC Transcontinental Packaging now offers an alternative made of two-layer adhesive lamination consisting of certified compostable materials. The print and barrier layer is NatureFlex, a cellulose- based product from Futamura USA and the heat-seal layer is composed of ecovio, a compostable biopolymer from BASF. One of the challenges of this structure was in the adhesive lamination of the two plies which was overcome with the Epotal product line, also from BASF, a compostable water-based adhesive that allows the packaging to pass the ASTM Standards it needs to be considered compostable. The inks are fully tested for ecotoxicity and the graphics are reverse-printed using standard flexographic printing technology. Finally, the bag shows printed verbiage to help consumers understand that it is compostable as part of the venue composting program.

To date, the introduction of this package is through specific Aramark venues where its composter has verified the compostability of the package. The packaging is shipped to filling plants in rollstock for vertical form-fill-seal machines.

The annual Flexible Packaging Achievement Awards Competition is conducted by the Flexible Packaging Association and showcases the industry’s innovation and the advances that have changed packaging. This year, 66 packages were submitted in the competition, for a total of 164 entries. The awards were presented in a ceremony as part of the FPA Annual Meeting on March 13. See all of the award winners by clicking here.

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