Environmental Tape Under Improved Development in Reaction to "Green Revolution"
The rapid development of mobile Internet has made online shopping one of the mainstream consumption methods. According to the public data of the State Post Office, the number of express deliveries in 2021 was 108.3 billion. In the first half of 2022, the number of express deliveries has reached 51.22 billion, up 3.7% year on year. In the recently concluded "Double 11 E-commerce Carnival", from November 1 to 11, postal express enterprises nationwide handled 4.272 billion packages. Through the striking statistics, we can learn that people are not only enjoying the convenience brought by online shopping, but also encountering with the increasingly prominent problem of express packaging pollution.
Source: Postal Operation of the State Post Office in the First Half of 2022
Speaking of the huge amount of garbage brought by express packaging, people tend to pay more attention to the amazing consumption of express packaging, while ignoring another invisible "pollution source"——that is, the tape which protects each package. On the day of the "Double 11" this year, the national express delivery volume was 552 million pieces. It is estimated that the average amount of tape used for each piece of express delivery in China is 0.8 meters, so the amount of tape used only on the day of the " Double 11" is about 442 million meters. Although many leading enterprises in the express industry have said that they will "downsize" the package, and try to reduce the use of tape while ensuring the safety and quality of the package, it is a drop in the bucket to alleviate the "white pollution" problem by reducing the amount of tape.
The environmental burden brought by such a huge amount of tape consumption is unbearable for human beings. How to reduce the pollution of express tape has become an urgent environmental problem to be solved.
Driven by the national green environmental protection policy, as early as January 2020, the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment released the Opinions on Further Strengthening the Control of Plastic Pollution, which explicitly expressed that the use of non-degradable plastic tape would be prohibited in postal express outlets nationwide at the end of 2025. Due to the promotion of national policies and the demand of some international businesses for the packaging of environmental tape, the degradable environmental tape was brought into the public's view, and has become another perfect solution for traditional tape enterprises to deal with the white pollution caused by express tape.
Source: Tape Structure Diagram
Although there are many degradable plastic films on the market at present, those made by blow-molding have problems such as insufficient tensile strength, inadequate optical properties, and over-fast degradation speed, which cannot meet the needs of tape. How to ensure the degradability, meanwhile meeting the product performance requirements, with easy processing and storage, is undoubtedly a problem that puzzles relevant professionals.
Last November, at the first Conference of New Materials Sci-Tech Innovation＆Development held in Xiamen, the guests received a "special" gift——the environmental tape. The appearance of this product has attracted the attention of the industry. The "core black technology" in its product base material is the first large-scale production of bio-based degradable membrane material BOPLA in China——BiONLY®。
BiONLY® has excellent mechanical properties and can meet the tensile strength requirements of the sealing tape; at the same time, it has high printing adaptability and is suitable for printing of environment-friendly water-based ink, with strong ink adhesion; for the sizing of the sealing tape, BOPLA film is suitable for environment-friendly water-based glue and it can be produced on the existing BOPP tape equipment without additional waterproof coating, improving equipment utilization and production efficiency, Effectively reduce equipment investment and social resource waste.
In addition, its controllable degradation feature allows the degradable tape to have no significant change in the product performance during the product life cycle that will not affect the normal use experience of consumers. After use, the degradable tape can be completely degraded into water and carbon dioxide, which is non-toxic and harmless to the environment, within 8 weeks at the earliest under industrial composting conditions. We can see from the simulated aging experiment and sea transportation that BiONLY®, when applied in the adhesive tape industry, has controllable degradation characteristics which can fully meet the needs of storage and transportation, and give convenience of the practical application for customers.
In the sea transport test, the rolled film passed through Singapore, Suez Canal and Greece by sea, and finally arrived in Belgium, crossing the equator and exposed to high temperature and humidity. After that through the comparison of the original and after-travelling physical properties, the basic physical properties of the film changed little, and the film appearance did not change significantly and there was no sticking situation.
Through the simulation of the aging test for 2 years (25 μM BOPLA Film Test Conditions: Benchmark: 23℃/60% RH; Aging Conditions: 45℃/85% RH; Acceleration Factor: 15.1), we can see that the tensile strength and heat sealing strength of BOPLA film do not decrease significantly under normal light and moisture proof conditions.
Benefiting from its excellent characteristics, BiONLY® can be widely used in all aspects of life; in addition to adhesive tape, it can also be used in the field of disposable film materials for flowers, fresh fruits, vegetables and others as well as in the field of functional film materials of soft packaging for food, electronic products, books, gift boxes, clothing and others; that is of great significance for packaging weight reduction and environmental carbon reduction.
A new round of industrial revolution has begun. In the context of the dual carbon era, sustainable development has become an inevitable way for all industries. When an irresistible wave of policies strikes, advanced enterprises can always firmly grasp the opportunity of "golden turning points". As for the e-commerce logistics, major enterprises have successively taken green and low-carbon as a major goal; perhaps we can start from the green solution focusing on tape, which means that BiONLY®, the degradable and environment-friendly adhesive tape made of composite materials will become an excellent choice for enterprises to develop sustainably, providing a new solution for green upgrading of enterprises' products, and a new method for solving white pollution in the future.
Email： BOPA55@chang-su.com.cn
Post time: Dec-02-2022