Saica Flex: Committed to sustainability from the outset

Only last year Saica Group unveiled its Research, Development & Innovation (R&D&I) Centre at its El Burgo de Ebro plant in Zaragoza, Spain.

The new R&D&I Centre aims to assist four divisions, Saica Flex among them, in developing new products, improving raw material efficiency, and offering advanced characterisation services for materials and processes.

“A piece of packaging can have the barrier properties and the levels of performance that the product requires, but it must also be recyclable,” continued Miguel Angel Dora. “Legislation from different governments worldwide will specify in more detail what is and isn’t recyclable, but in our case, we’re the ones that also recycle that piece of paper or that pack. When we work with R&D and make claims, they’re real claims. They have to be genuine because afterwards, we’re the ones needing to do the recycling.

“When we’re talking about films, it’s true that we’re facing different challenges because we can design packaging to be recycled. We have another claim that in 2025, we want 100% of our structures to have the option to be designed for recycling, but after that, it has to be collected, sorted and recycled, and it’s here where there is more work to be done. Not necessarily by us, but by administrations, companies, and third parties on the collection, sorting, and recycling technologies.”

Flexible packaging already brings an innate set of contributions towards sustainability, largely through its ability to minimise waste. It can be designed to fit the product better, reducing the use of excess materials.

On top of that, its lightweight construction results in fewer materials used overall, and the ones that are used often require fewer resources to produce. Then, there is the reduced transportation emissions. But as Miguel Angel Dora points out, this is nowhere near enough.

“We’re focusing all our strategy on sustainability,” he added. “If you see a customer that Saica supplies, they want to meet their sustainability commitments. Sustainability is sometimes not easy. We’re looking at efficiency, cost, and run-ability on the customer’s machines, but sustainability takes up most of our time. The questions we get, the R&D inquiries we get, the questions we obtain from the plants, and the new investments we make are all related to sustainability and producing the most sustainable packaging with the most efficient cost.

“We focus a lot of effort on the end-to-end calculation as we call it at Saica, so when we create something new, what effect does it have from the very beginning, and on raw materials, right until that packaging is on the shelf in the store? We calculate transport, the runability of the customer, the materials, the processes – that’s where we spend most of the time.”