Berry Global has won the prestigious 2023 Horners Bottlemakers Award for the innovative closed loop recycled paint container solution for its Paintainer range.
Awarded annually by the Worshipful Company of Horners and the British Plastics Federation, the Horners Bottlemakers Award is hotly contested – and judges confirmed that the 2023 edition saw a strong field of entries.
Berry won for its closed loop system, which provides a solution to tackle the problem of recycling used plastic paint containers through a circular partnership that combines paint and packaging recovery and recycling.
Although paint containers have used recycled plastic in their manufacture for many years, recycling the containers after usage was much more of a problem because it was very difficult to remove enough of the residue paint from the containers to make them suitable for recycling.
Berry’s solution has tackled this issue by treating both the containers and the paint as valuable assets. The paint is first removed and re-engineered into new paint by a specialist company, Paint360. This leaves the empty paint cans ready to be recycled back into paint cans again.
“In this way, we are reducing the environmental impact of both the paint and its packaging through the reduction of waste product sent to landfill and the carbon emissions associated with incineration,” explained Jamie Riley, Sustainability Manager at Berry Global.
The judges said: “The initiative marks an important step in the recycling of containers that have residual material in them, in that the challenges in both the washing process and the recovery and reuse of the containers have been overcome.
“All our Awards have a sustainability component within their criteria and your entry certainly sits very well within this ethos,” they added.
The 2023 Horners Bottlemakers Award was presented to Berry at a ceremony on Wednesday 27th September at the Interplas UK conference and exhibition, at the NEC in Birmingham. Josh North from Berry’s Oakham factory, where the circular Paintainer is produced, accepted the award on behalf of the company.
As well as its solutions for the paints and surface coatings sector, Berry offers a wide range of plastic containers, pots and tubs to meet product and branding requirements in a diverse range of other markets including food, pharmaceuticals and industrial.
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