Mondelez thinks that the recycled packaging technology recently introduced for Cadbury Dairy Milk in Australia will be able to provide sustainable packaging choices for other markets in the Asia-Pacific area in the future years.
Mondelez recently announced that Cadbury Dairy Milk blocks in Australia will feature recycled packaging manufactured from old soft plastic, a first for the brand.
“The recyclable packaging will be used across the Cadbury Dairy Milk family blocks range,” Mondelez President for Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, Darren O’Brien, told FoodNavigator-Asia.
Cadbury Dairy Milk family blocks are available in over 20 distinct tastes on store shelves around Australia.
“Not only is this a world first for Cadbury, but Cadbury Australia will be among the first in the world to purchase recycled content soft plastic packaging.”
The technique used to achieve this will allow recycled packaging to have “exactly the same” properties as ordinary plastic packaging.
“The beauty of modern recycling technology is that it returns soft plastic packaging to its basic building blocks, allowing soft plastic to become a fully circular material,” O’Brien added.
“It will perform and exhibit the same qualities as virgin soft plastic packaging.”
When asked about the possibilities of this recycled packaging in other APAC regions, notably Malaysia and Indonesia, where humidity has long been a barrier to producing more sustainable packaging, he noted that this solution was feasible to be used even in these situations.
Consumers should expect to see this technology expand fast in the next few years, bringing additional recycled packaging alternatives to APAC and beyond. “We also anticipate that more of these new materials and recycling technologies will become available in the coming years.”
Mondelez Australia had previously tested a “world-first” plastic-free packaging on chocolates made for international shipping, which employed a “fully-sealed paper substance” with no laminates, foils, or plastics.
O’Brien would not say whether the experiment was successful, but he did say that “work is continuing” on the company’s quest for more sustainable packaging choices in partnership with partners in order to fulfil the sustainability standards and expectations of “consumers, customers, and legislators.”
Another similar effort
Nestle Australia also stated earlier this year that they had begun a “wildly ambitious” project to build a prototype recycled plastic wrapper for KitKat.
The wrapper garnered news for being “Australia’s first soft plastic food wrapper created from recycled content,” but the company stressed that it was only a prototype meant to “show what is technically achievable.”
Of course, we’d love to bring this to market, but there are still gaps between this prototype and commercialising the wrapper on any significant scale, which requires every single part of Australia’s recycling system to think and do things differently, “Nestle Oceania Head of Corporate Affairs Margaret Stuart told us at the time.
When it comes to curbside collection of soft plastics, such as those used to produce this wrapper, one very obvious example is when it comes to soft plastics. Currently, most collections are still reliant on supermarket collection programmes, making scaling up challenging at this time.
At this point, Mondelez is commercialising this ambitious endeavour, expecting to collect and produce enough recycled plastic for 50 million family blocks of Cadbury Dairy Milk, despite the fact that the technology being used is not currently sourced locally and that the recycled plastic material sourced is still only about 30 percent of the amount needed to wrap these products.
While we sourced this recycled material using cutting-edge technology from overseas, we know that demand for circular packaging will continue to rise, and we’d want to see recycling technology constructed in Australia to fulfil local needs, said O’Brien.
Mondelez will offer the first Cadbury Dairy Milk blocks in Australian supermarkets in September 2022, utilising recycled soft plastic in their packaging.