Removing labels from bottles is emerging as a practical way to improve recycling efficiency—and a new embossed PLA water bottle shows how design choices can directly support circular packaging systems.
A label-free beverage bottle developed for the South Korean market uses embossed branding to replace conventional labels, eliminating one of the main obstacles to efficient bottle recycling. By integrating brand identification directly into the bottle wall, the design allows bottles to enter recycling streams without additional processing, supporting cleaner material flows and higher-quality recycled output.
The embossed approach preserves shelf recognition and visual appeal, while avoiding the need for manual label removal—supporting both operational efficiency and material purity in recycling processes.
The bottle is designed to integrate into a closed-loop PLA recycling system established by TotalEnergies Corbion and Sansu (i’m eco). Post-consumer bottles are collected, pre-processed, and chemically recycled via hydrolysis, breaking PLA down into its original building block—lactic acid monomer—which is then reused to produce new recycled Luminy® PLA (rPLA) with consistent material performance.
Made from Luminy® PLA, TotalEnergies Corbion’s biobased plastic designed for recycling and composting, the bottle demonstrates how material innovation and recycling infrastructure can be aligned to enable circular reuse at scale.
Recent independently verified Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) results further support the environmental performance of this approach. According to the latest Luminy® PLA LCA, virgin PLA achieves a significantly lower carbon footprint compared with conventional plastics, while incorporating recycled PLA enables carbon-neutral and carbon-negative material options, depending on recycled content.
From early recycling trials in 2021 to the commercial launch of a label-free bottle today, the collaboration between TotalEnergies Corbion and Sansu (i’m eco) illustrates how front-end packaging design and back-end recycling innovation can be developed together to create scalable circular solutions.
Hao Ding, Global Marketing Director at TotalEnergies Corbion said: “As markets increasingly focus on recyclability, carbon performance, and consumer acceptance, this project demonstrates the potential of PLA-based solutions to meet functional requirements while supporting broader circular economy objectives—without compromising brand recognition or industrial performance.”
Developed as part of a collaboration that began in 2021, the bottle is made from Luminy® PLA and features the brand logo directly embossed into the bottle wall. By eliminating conventional labels, the design removes a common barrier to efficient recycling and enables cleaner material streams without additional processing steps.