中文Every packaging company on the planet now has a sustainability slide in its investor deck. Most of them are, if we are honest, theatre — a few recycled-content claims, a net-zero promise with a date so far out it will be someone else’s problem, and a sigh of relief that the regulator is satisfied. Vaibhav Jha, CEO of Ester Industries, stood up at the 13th Specialty Films & Flexible Packaging Global Summit in Mumbai and basically said: that is not good enough, and it never was.
His argument is deceptively simple. “Sustainability is not a choice, it’s a social responsibility for all of us,” Jha told the room, pointing to the widening gap between how fast we consume resources and how slowly the planet regenerates them. Regulation is accelerating, sure, but he sees consumer demand becoming the real engine — research shows strong interest in sustainable products, with recyclability sitting at the top of the attributes people actually associate with “sustainable.”
The interesting part is what he wants to do next. Mechanical recycling and the established approaches have moved the industry forward, but Jha is blunt that they cannot solve the next level of the problem on their own. What the industry needs, he says, are technologies that bring materials back into high-value applications — not just shuffle them into something cheaper and lower down the chain.
For flexible packaging, the starting point is design. Jha notes that natural systems run in cycles, where the output of one process becomes the input for the next. Packaging should adopt the same principle. He sees real potential in PET-based structures, partly because around 65 percent of flexible packaging ends up in food-contact applications, where you cannot compromise on performance or economics just to tick a green box.
Ester says it has already developed technology to fold recycled PET into film production while keeping manufacturing costs under control, with roughly 30,000 tonnes of RPET capacity aimed at film today. It is also working on mono-material PE structures, including a patented approach that combines recyclability with downgauging and better cost competitiveness — the holy grail of “same performance, less material, actually recyclable.”
But the headline is ELITe — Ester Loop Infinite Technologies — a 50:50 joint venture with Loop Industries. Ester is building a chemical recycling facility in Gujarat with a planned capacity of 70,000 tonnes a year. The technology can break polyester-heavy laminates down into virgin-like monomers, which can then become recycled PET again. It is designed primarily for textile-to-textile recycling but will also handle bottle-to-bottle and laminate-to-laminate, strengthening polyester circularity across sectors.
This is not a science-fair dream. Jha says the project represents an investment of more than INR 1,000 crore, with commissioning expected in about a year and a half, and — crucially — commercial offtake agreements already signed with major brands. That last detail is the whole point. As Jha noted, in other sectors brands have backed emerging recycling tech through advance commitments and offtake agreements, giving developers the confidence to invest and scale. Money committed early is what turns a pilot into a plant.
His final point is the one packaging executives should tape to the wall: the economics of sustainability have to be judged across the entire value chain, not just at the film stage. A premium at the raw-material level looks big to a converter but becomes tiny by the time the finished product reaches the consumer. “Innovation is a necessity now for achieving meaningful sustainability goals,” he said.
For an industry addicted to incremental improvement, that is a bracing message. The next step is not another slightly better resin. It is building the technology and the commercial partnerships that make circularity actually work at scale.
Source: The Packman — “Ester Industries looks beyond compliance to build circularity at scale”
