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The resin market is doing something that we haven't seen since Hurricane Katrina. North American producers are exporting at record premiums to European buyers, draining domestic supply and sending costs to historic highs, with no clear end in sight. Operations teams are absorbing the shock, and the industry is looking for answers.

Atlantic Packaging’s MUST Stretch Film Management System provides one of those answers while also addressing issues of sustainability. To discuss this solution, we spoke to Ric Lee, Stretch Sales & Marketing Director at Atlantic Packaging.

“What we do is help customers to set and hold the correct standard for how they wrap every load,” Lee said. “By doing that, what we find is that we reduce customers’ usage by an average of about 45 percent while reducing their cost by between 20 and 25 percent, so it’s a pretty dramatic cost savings.”

Lee notes: “Last year, we reduced Coca-Cola’s cost for stretch film by $4.2 million. We did that by reducing the pounds they use by 2.1 million pounds. … The whole idea is to manage and reduce the usage of stretch film.”

MUST feeds directly into Atlantic’s closed-loop PCR film program, in partnership with Coca-Cola Consolidated. During our interview, Lee elaborated upon that partnership.

“We reached out to them and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to buy this $4-million recycling equipment. Would you guys like to be a partner in that?’ They were very open to it,” Lee explains. “So we embarked on becoming a recycler. The only way we felt like we could fix the PCR or the recycled content problem would be to control the recycled content that would go back into the stretch film.”

Listen to the full interview with Lee