Our pre-commercialization product is a recyclable packaging bag for block-frozen fish.
Fishing vessels stay at sea long, gathering hundreds of tons of fish. The caught fish is frozen, on board, into 25-kg, flat blocks of frozen fish, each of a size of about 53 x 53 x 10 cm. The frozen blocks must be packed into packaging bags to be kept clean, closed from air. These hard, flat frozen fish block packages are then stacked up, mostly manually, in the freezing hold of the fishing vessel, from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall. The sea is rough, the storage room is shaking and swinging. The flat-shaped frozen packages must be able to stay stable on top of each other WITHOUT ANY SLIPPING on each other, which is a great challenge. Also, the bags must be very PUNCTURE RESISTANT because sharp frozen fins and tails of fish project from the fish blocks.
Until now only one kind of fish bag was known to be able to meet both the anti-slip and the strength challenge: the so-called 'sandwich' bag, which is made from a coated woven polypropylene fabric (giving strength and barrier) whose outer surface is fully laminated with a strong kraft paper against slipping. The bags' paper outer surfaces freeze to each other, preventing slippage. (A woven PP fabric bag, without the paper, is too slippery for this purpose, especially when it gets icy or frosty.) The sandwich bag is non-recyclable and is burnt after use.
Our new fish bag is a fully recyclable polypropylene bag. It is a polypropylene woven fabric bag (for strength) extrusion-coated with polypropylene (for barrier, and for heat closure if the coat is inside the bag), the outer surface provided with our patented new surface treatment, for extreme anti-slip properties, as follows.
The top side of our bag is laminated with a thin polypropylene nonwoven fabric, like that used in baby diapers, and the bottom side of the bag is roughened in a special way: there are many tiny anti-slip protrusions, made of polypropylene, strongly fused to the bag's wall. The nonwoven surface gives an incredible anti-slip bond with the abutting roughened bag surface, still liftable therefrom without extra effort. The packages are to be stacked on each other with their 'female' sides looking upwards and their other, 'male', sides looking downwards (or vice versa), and are all, thus, kept in hook-and-loop-like anti-slip bonds. This anti-slip bond is not sensitive to surficial moisture, frost or ice. The stacks are safe and stable and the bags are fully recyclable polypropylene bags.
Our bag is at least as anti-slip as the old sandwich bag, and ours weighs less and is thinner to store. Its material costs are also lower. And it is recyclable.
We conducted successful field tests on a fishing vessel. We filed for patents. We have a partner for the manufacturing of the machine to make the surface treatment. We look forward to finding a partner for bag manufacturing and marketing very soon.