Do more with less
The journey to reduce packaging thickness – e.g film downgauging – started a while ago and is enabled by materials like Exceed™. It is still going very strong for two main reasons:
- The portfolio of enabling molecules keeps expanding and pushing the envelope of film performance – Exceed™, Exceed™ XP and now Exceed™ S performance PE.
- Extrusion equipment – keeps progressing – from one layer 20 years ago, 3 layers were the standard about 10 years ago, and now the standard is becoming 5 layers and we are seeing more and more installations of film orientating equipment that can help boost film stiffness – such as MDO machine direction orientation, and BOPE biaxially oriented films.
Through this combination of improvements we estimate that over the last 10 years, and across a sampling of ~30 packaging applications, the average film thickness has decreased ~2 to 3% per year, year-on-year. On the basis of that data, we estimate that through the use of performance PE, the film industry helped to avoid the consumption of ~1.3 MT (1.3 MT) of plastic for the year 2021 alone vs. 2010 reference! (ExxonMobil analysis, aggregated numbers across 30 film segments and sub-segments).