中文Here’s a date that should be circled on every packaging converter’s calendar: January 1, 2030. That’s when the European Union’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation kicks in with full force, requiring every piece of packaging sold in the EU to meet minimum recyclability thresholds.
Grade C or higher. Roughly 70% recyclable. Or it doesn’t go on the shelf.
If that sounds like a far-off problem, ask any packaging engineer who’s spent the last two years trying to make a potato chip bag recyclable. These things take time. The materials science is brutal. And the clock is ticking.
At interpack 2026 in Dusseldorf this past May, two companies that have been quietly solving these problems for over a decade — Bobst and Michelman — laid out exactly how far they’ve gotten and where they’re going next.
98% polyethylene, 98% recyclable
The headline number from their presentation was the oneBarrier PrimeCycle structure. It’s a mono-material polyethylene solution — meaning it’s essentially one plastic, not the multi-layer Frankenstein materials that make most flexible packaging unrecyclable — and it scored 98% recyclability in external testing by cyclos-HTP.
Think about what that means. A flexible package that protects food as well as the old unrecyclable stuff, made almost entirely from a single material, and it can actually go into the recycling stream. Not theoretically recyclable. Actually verified recyclable.
The trick is in the layers. Bobst applies vacuum metallization — aluminum layers about a thousand times thinner than a human hair — onto Michelman’s water-based primers. The result delivers oxygen and water vapor barrier performance that rivals traditional aluminum foil, but in a structure that’s still 98% PE.
Nick Copeland, Bobst’s R&D director for barrier solutions, summed up the challenge: “We needed to get the same barrier performance on much more challenging, less performing substrates.” In other words, the old multi-layer materials were easy to make work. The new mono-materials are harder, and you still can’t compromise on shelf life.
Paper gets the same treatment
If mono-material plastic sounds impressive, the paper-based version is even more ambitious. oneBarrier FibreCycle starts with a substrate that — as Copeland bluntly noted — “has absolutely no functional barrier.” Paper doesn’t block oxygen. It doesn’t block moisture. It’s basically a sponge.
So Bobst and Michelman had to build a barrier from scratch. Two wet coating phases — a primer before metallization, a heat-sealable top-coat after — applied to carefully selected paper substrates developed in partnership with UPM Specialty Materials. The resulting structures achieved oxygen transmission rates as low as 0.02-0.1 cc/m2/day while maintaining moisture barrier performance under tropical conditions.
Recyclability testing through CEPI harmonized protocols confirmed what the companies called “excellent recyclability performance.” For brand owners under pressure to shift from plastic to paper without sacrificing product protection, that’s the kind of data that justifies serious investment.
What’s next: bio-based and plastic-free
The presentation at interpack didn’t stop at recycling. Bobst and Michelman also showed proof-of-concept packaging using bio-based, plastic-free coating systems — structures designed to be both recyclable and compostable while complying with the EU Single-Use Plastics Directive. They demonstrated the concept running on industrial equipment at 350 envelopes per minute with 100% sealing performance.
Thierry Van Migem, Michelman’s European sales director, was characteristically direct about the non-negotiable: “We cannot give in on performance. People want their products to retain the same shelf life.”
That’s the real constraint driving all of this R&D. Sustainability is mandatory now. But if the sustainable package can’t protect the product as well as the old one, nobody’s buying it. Bobst and Michelman have spent a decade proving those two things don’t have to be in conflict.
The 2030 deadline is coming. These solutions are ready.
Source: THE PACKMAN — Bobst and Michelman advance regulation-ready recyclable solutions
