"Siegwerk's printable-tunable light barrier coating can eliminate hard-to-recycle (white/colored) plastics to clear sustainable alternatives, without compromising on light barrier performance. From an environmental impact standpoint, clear plastic packaging can be recycled easily and at a lower carbon footprint in comparison to hard-to-recycle plastics.
In addition, printable-tunable light barrier coatings can be tailored to work with existing recycling streams, such as floatables (stay-on label inks), washable inks (deinkable shrink sleeves), and monomaterial films (MDO-PE). This innovative light barrier coating solution can be tuned to block (up to 99.8%) light in the wavelength range of 200 nm - 900 nm. Patent Pending. This solution is significant, as it could potentially replace white/colored films, that are being incinerated or converted to landfill waste today with clear plastic films - which could be re-purposed/recycled into a circular economy loop. White PETg film is used almost exclusively to protect light sensitive products from degradation, but today is not recyclable. White PETg makes up close to 4% of all shrink sleeve films globally. This equates to an estimated 25,000,000 lbs. of white PETg globally that can immediately be converted to clear cPET and added into the recycle stream creating more rPET capacity (4% increase)."