SABIC, Gualapack and Ella’s Kitchen collaborate to launch baby food cap made with advanced recycled plastics

SABIC has announced a new collaboration with UK-based baby food producer Ella’s Kitchen to create a new cap made from recycled plastic.

Over 3.5 million pouches of Ella’s Kitchen’s Organic Strawberries and Apples pouches will have this new cap and will be on the shelves in UK stores from January 2022.

The recycled content for the cap is created using certified circular polymers from SABIC’s TRUCIRCLE portfolio and comes from recycled plastics from post-consumer waste that would otherwise typically be destined for incineration or landfill.

SABIC’s resins are then used by Gualapack to produce the cap. Ella’s Kitchen will become the first company in the baby food category to use certified circular polymers from SABIC’s TRUCIRCLE portfolio.

Abdullah Al-Otaibi, ETP & Market Solution General Manager at SABIC, said: “Using advanced recycling technology we produce materials for high-quality, food-grade packaging which can be upcycled over and over again. This new collaboration with Ella’s Kitchen is beneficial to the eco-system of food packaging and is another significant step towards a circular economy for used-plastics.”

Stefano Manfredi, Global Sales and Marketing Director at Gualapack, added: “We are delighted to be part of this innovative journey together with our customer and supplier as we have the ambition to offer the largest portfolio of sustainable solutions.”

SABIC’s TRUCIRCLE portfolio spans a range of products and services, including design for recyclability, mechanically recycled products, certified circular products from feedstock recycling of used plastic, certified renewables products from bio-based feedstock and closed-loop initiatives to recycle plastic back into high quality applications and help prevent valuable used plastics from becoming waste.

Through pyrolysis, difficult-to-recycle used plastic is broken down into its chemical building blocks to produce pyrolysis oil. This is then used as feedstock to create certified circular polymers which have the same properties as virgin material.

SABIC's circular polymers are certified under the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification Plus (ISCC PLUS) scheme following a mass balance approach.