bioplasticsMAGAZINE_1205

Application News
(Photo: Iggesund)
Airline breakfast box
The Swedish airline Malmö Aviation has recently launched
new breakfast boxes made of Invercote Bio, a bioplasticscoated
paperboard. The boxes save space on board, simplify
handling and have a lower environmental impact than
their plastic-based predecessors. In addition the bioplastic
coated paperboard exhibits a very good structural stiffness
compared to any pure plastics (or bioplastics) solution.
The environmental impact is reduced because some
members of the Invercote family of paperboard are certified
compostable. The new breakfast boxes are the result of a
long development process focusing on both functionality
and user friendliness. Instigators of the development
were the catering company PickNick (Bromma, Sweden),
the converters Omikron (Jönköping, Sweden) and Malmö
Aviation’s then project leader Annika Melin.
The materials used in the boxes are the virgin fibre-based
paperboards Invercote Bio from Iggesund Paperboard
(Iggesund, Sweden). In a first step the box is made of Invercote
Bio. In a later stage, the outer shell of the box will be made
from conventional Invercote and a serving tray inside made of
Invercote Bio to hold the fresh food. This tray will then be flow
packed with a modified atmosphere to increase the food’s
shelf life and help prevent fogging. The ingenious feature
of Invercote Bio is that it is coated with bioplastic. Iggesund
chose an extrusion coating version of a biobased Polyester by
Novamont (Novara, Italy). This means that once the service
is in full scale the tray will go into the same waste stream as
the food scraps – they will all be sent directly to an anaerobic
digestion plant to produce biogas without the need for prior
sorting, just as PickNick has been doing with their food waste
already in the past.
”The combination of paperboard and bioplastic which are
certified compostable to European standards means that the
new box functions well in today’s end-of-life systems and will
continue to do so in future systems,” comments Jonas Adler,
commercial manager of the Invercote Bio products from
Iggesund.
“Because the new breakfast boxes are smaller than our
current ones, we can load far more onto each serving trolley,”
explains Malin Olin, inflight and lounge manager for Malmö
Aviation. “That saves weight and space on board and helps
the environment. The boxes also have two parts, making
them easier to use.”
Omikron has been working with catering materials since
the beginning of the 1980s. It was a natural choice for the
company to work with Invercote and Invercote Bio.
“This has been an exciting development project, not least
because Malmö Aviation has consciously chosen to invest in
both quality and the environment,” comments Tony Norén,
CEO of the converters Omikron. “Being able to reduce the
space required by half and also to greatly extend the food’s
shelf life are interesting effects, while both the environmental
and climate impact are also reduced.”
“Increasingly organisations and individuals are thinking
about the ‘end-of-life’ issue of many products in everyday
use, and therefore the creation and disposal of waste. We
believe bioplastics can provide part of the solution to certain
aspects of this issue as they can be composted together with
organic waste,” said Catia Bastioli, CEO of Novamont. MT
www.malmoaviation.se
www.picknick.nu
www.iggesund.com
22 bioplastics MAGAZINE [05/12] Vol. 7