Sustainability 11.2.23

LiquiGlide® technology enables sustainable packaging

Reducing waste for a healthier planet

Picture this: Just as you’re about to walk out the door, balancing your coffee, work bag, and breakfast in hand, you remember that you haven’t brushed your teeth. You’re already running late.

Upon flinging open your cabinet drawer, you see your mangled tube of toothpaste, twisted and cracked from your attempts to get all of its contents out. Even though the tube still has some of the product left inside, you are already late and resort to throwing it away and opening a new one.

While this scenario is undoubtedly infuriating, it is more importantly wasteful.

Our scientists found that up to 13% of each toothpaste tube is wasted because users can’t get the rest of the paste out. It’s not just this dental product that has a problem: condiments weigh in at 3-15% wasted contents, detergent bottles leave 7-16% of the product inside, and 17-25% of each bottle of lotion is lost in this sticky situation.

Fortunately, LiquiGlide® technology offers a solution.

The basics of LiquiGlide® technology

In 2009, Kripa Varanasi and Dave Smith invented permanently wet “liquid-impregnated surfaces” (“LIS”) technology while working in Varanasi’s research group at MIT. Their technique uses textured solid material to trap a liquid lubricant through capillary and intermolecular forces. This coating wicks through the textured solid surface, clinging permanently under the product, allowing the product to slide off the surface easily.

LiquiGlide® technology alters surfaces, rather than adding a layer of a new substance. The surface of the bottle or container is textured if not already, then impregnated with a slippery, patented liquid.

Zooming into the LiquiGlide® engineered packaging, the substrate — or in consumer terms, the product — hovers over the surface, gliding rather than sticking. Coatings for food applications like sauce containers are made of food materials, and the same principle is applied to consumer packaged goods (CPG) applications, making the technology safe for consumption.

That gets us to where we are today. From the experts behind LiquiGlide® technology comes Arnasi, a product development company engineering unique and sustainable product experiences in the realms of biomedical, beauty, and beyond.

The impact of sustainable packaging

If you’ve ever visited a landfill, you know how overwhelming it can be. Seeing all that trash collecting in mountains, it’s hard not to wonder if some of the materials in the terrain could have been recycled. And chances are, they could have.

Over 50 billion packages are sold each year containing “viscous products,” or substances which stick to surfaces. If you compiled all 50 billion of these packages, you could fill 110,000 semi-trucks. That’s a lot of trash mountains.

Sam Winslow, Arnasi’s senior director of commercial strategy, said the right packaging materials make containers easy to recycle because they are already empty. In other words, consumers can skip the clean-out process.

“If you choose the right packaging materials, LiquiGlide® technology makes the packaging easily recyclable for consumers because it’s already completely empty. One of the major challenges with recycling is consumer behavior. If it feels natural and empty, then it’s easier for something to end up in the recycle bin.”

Beyond recycling, LiquiGlide® technology enables Arnasi to make thicker, concentrated products by eliminating their susceptibility to stick to packaging. Concentrated products mean smaller packages, which increases the number of packages per shipment, decreasing the transportation cost and therefore reducing fuel emissions.

Challenges to sustainability

When it comes to sustainability, both brands and consumers are susceptible to roadblocks.

For brands, Winslow noted the need to make money. As for consumers, while sustainability may be important, there is often reluctance to pay extra for it. Consumers would rather brands make that investment.

Additionally, he said there are technical and marketing challenges. Recently launched reloadable and refillable products often require multiple reloads for the cost to compete with single-use alternatives, and they also limit the consumer’s availability to try new products, according to Winslow.

“I’d love to see more collaborations of multiple brands working together to use a packaging format that has one outer piece, then you can interchange multiple reloads so that there is product variety while still capitalizing on the potential of reload concepts,” he said.

Looking to Arnasi

At Arnasi, we see the immense potential for LiquiGlide® technology to make the world a more sustainable place across industries. From biomedical to beauty and beyond, we are applying innovative solutions to formulations, packaging and more. It’s what makes us who we are!

Between biomedical and CPG applications, the biomedical space presents more challenges to creating sustainable solutions due to package security risks. But even so, Arnasi’s ostomy solutions line will prioritize recyclable materials.

“In the ostomy line it will be more about driving that demand for sustainable innovation. I don’t think it’ll be as front and center in the marketing as it will be in the beauty line, but you can still expect that the ostomy products will have a sustainability angle to them in the formats that we use,” Winslow says.

To Winslow and the Arnasi team, sustainable innovation is a mindset. It’s about ingredients, sourcing, workflow, development priorities, creativity, lateral thinking, and storytelling.

For more information on Arnasi’s promise of sustainable packaging, check out the rest of our blogs, find us on social media, or contact our team at investorrelations@arnasigroup.com.

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