Baby food producer Jufico (Horb am Neckar / Germany; www.fruchtbarewelt.de) will be the first company in Germany to offer its organic “FruchtBar” brand fruit purées in recyclable polypropylene pouches from Gualapack (Castellazzo Bormida / Italy; www.gualapackgroup.com).

The “Pouch5” containers, which are available for hot filled and pasteurised shelf-stable products as well as for cold filling, for example for dairy products, do not have an aluminium layer. But even the Pouch5 cannot do without a barrier layer. “We use a high-barrier PP film that matches the performance of high-barrier PET film,” a Gualapack spokesperson told Plasteurope.com. The spouted pouch is made from more than 90% PP, meeting the definition of a recyclable mono-material. The spokesperson did not want to provide details regarding the material and thickness or proportion of the required barrier layer.

According to Gualapack, a test run the Italian company carried out in collaboration with sorting technology specialist Tomra (Asker / Norway; www.tomra.com) showed that the Pouch5 containers were correctly identified as PP in a sorting centre in Germany.

In the meantime, the bags – which were simultaneously introduced by Nestlé (Vevey / Switzerland; www.nestle.com) for its brands “Gerber” in the US and “Piltti” in Finland – have been certified as recyclable by environmental services provider Interseroh (Cologne / Germany; www.interseroh.com). “We examined the squeeze bag ... according to the criteria of the Bifa environmental institute and the Fraunhofer IVV,” says Interseroh packaging engineer Julian Thielen. “If a package achieves more than 18 points out of 20 points in the evaluation, we give it the ‘Made for Recycling’ label. The Pouch5 bags received 20 points.” According to Thielen, they should be disposed of in Germany’s “Gelber Sack” (yellow bag) for plastics waste or the bin for recyclable materials.