With the WorldStar winners recently being announced, here is a sampling of transit packaging/reusable packaging winners, featuring Bouncee, FRIES Kunststofftechnik GmbH and Aion AS.
Bouncee – Reusable Insulating Crates for Temperature-Controlled Distribution
Category: Transit
Bouncee is an innovative reusable, collapsible insulated crate designed to meet the stringent demands of temperature-controlled food and pharmaceutical logistics. It is primarily suited to short-transit applications (<14hrs) such as grocery e-commerce and pharmacy distribution, where it delivers revolutionary efficiencies and cost reductions at scale.
Bouncee draws inspiration and stands on the shoulders of the globally renowned collapsible Returnable Plastic Crates (RPCs) as the first true insulated collapsible RPC. It embodies the same circular economy and highly efficient principles.
Bouncee is built on a modular architecture, allowing individual panels to be removed and replaced. This effectively repairs the crate and saves the financial and environmental investment left in the crate. The patented composite is also made of two forms of recyclable PP. Notable features:
- Bouncee is a standalone collapsible insulated crate made from a patented composite of expanded polypropylene for insulation and rigid polypropylene to maximize service life in critical areas, like hinges.
- It collapses to <50% of its assembled size for efficient storage, logistics and internal movements.
- The collapsible design retains all internal volume and space for goods.
- Doesn’t compromise weight. A standard 600 x 400 x 310mm H Bouncee remains under 2kg, lighter than its equivalent non-insulated plastic crate used in e-commerce grocery logistics.
- The innovative design eliminates air gaps, ensuring optimal thermal performance. Using matching reusable phase-change materials, it can be configured to any temperature.
- Depending on the application, it can be used with minimal or no refrigeration – offsetting costs and emissions and increasing flexibility.
- It can be made in various folding formats, colors, and sizes, with handles, asset labels, and many other common industry features/requirements.
Before Bouncee, the rules of the short transit temperature control category were:
- Rigid insulated crates are inefficient at scale. They take up large amounts of space in storage and logistics and require many additional movements in operations.
- Folding designs have air gaps and poor temperature control. They are prone to breakage due to weak hinges.
- Nestable designs can save space, but tapering the thick-walled insulation compromises the internal volume available for goods.
- Insulated liners for plastic crates solve some problems; however, the thick insulation lines the inside of the crate reduces the volume for goods. Weight is also compromised as the solution is now a crate plus insulation.
Bouncee eliminates these long-standing rules and advances the adoption of reusable packaging. Since its launch, over 30 grocery, healthcare, and meal delivery businesses have adopted Bouncee, validating its applicability. The solution has also gained the attention of multinational grocers and has many exciting implementations in the pipeline.
Reusable Stacking Corner for Sheet Goods
Category: Transit
FRIES Kunststofftechnik GmbH’s Reusable Stacking Corner is an innovative solution for meeting the challenges of industrial, heavy-duty, and inter-company transit packaging. It provides exceptional protection for sheet materials such as metal, wood, plastic, and glass during transportation, enhancing efficiency while reducing waste and cost.
The Reusable Stacking Corner is engineered for robust performance, offering superior protection of large, heavy, and fragile materials. Its modular design features two spring-loaded parts that automatically adjust to the thickness of the materials being transported. This ensures a secure grip on products, protecting edges and corners from damage, a common issue in transit. Additionally, it is compatible with tension belts for enhanced stability during movement, ensuring products remain securely in place even on inclined surfaces.
Eliminates waste: One of the key benefits of the Reusable Stacking Corner is its ability to reduce costs and resource consumption. Unlike traditional single-use packaging materials, such as Styrofoam or wood, this stacking corner is reusable, significantly cutting packaging waste and disposal expenses. Its recyclable components further minimize the environmental impact, making it a more sustainable solution for heavy-duty industrial transit.
Reparable: The stacking corner’s modular design allows for the replacement of individual components if they become damaged, extending the product’s lifecycle and ensuring long-term use. This flexibility makes it ideal for inter-company and industrial packaging, where durability and adaptability are essential. The device is lightweight and compact, enabling easy stacking and unstacking, and reducing the overall footprint during transit and storage. Its self-compatible stacking system simplifies logistics, as the same aid can be used on all four corners of a package, streamlining operations.
Safety and Usability: The Reusable Stacking Corner enhances workplace safety. It is lightweight and can be easily handled by a single person, reducing the risk of injury during assembly or transportation. The smooth surface minimizes potential injuries, while its efficient design eliminates the need for specialized tools or trained personnel for installation.
Aion Nestable Pallet Uses Reclaimed Aquaculture Plastic
Company: Aion AS www.aion.eco
Country: Norway Category: Packaging Materials and Components
Recycled material: The Aion Nestable Pallet uses up to 100% high-quality recycled plastic packaging, reclaimed from Norwegian aquaculture, an industry with a large environmental footprint and huge volumes of plastic waste. This pallet is designed specifically for use in that same industry, to replace its annual use of over 4.5 million wooden pallet shipments. All pallets are returned at end-of-life to be recycled and used to manufacture new pallets again for the same purpose. AION also utilizes industrial plastic waste from FIBC bigbags used to transport fish feed for pallet production.
Ease of recyclability: The lightweight pallet design of 10,2kg is made without reinforcements or a mix of materials that would hinder recycling. This pallet is designed to be easily ground down at the end of life.
Traceability: AION traces the value chain from the material origin of collected packaging, with insights on composition, contamination, and quality – to tracking pallet production in Denmark, and information on the return of discarded pallets for re-manufacturing. Aion believes that full value chain traceability is key to creating a fully circular product.
Improved space utilization: Designed to optimize return logistics with its superior nestable feature, 49 AION pallets fits in one stack (1617 per truck) compared, it states, to other nestable plastic pallets fitting 1350-1450, and standard wooden EUR pallets fitting 17 per stack (561 per truck). Resulting in less air being transported per truck and increased storage.
Pallet features:
- Extra material reinforcement in pallet corners reduces breakage, and 50 mm ribs inside each of the legs to further increase strength and better distribute force
- A ribbed design around the outside of the legs also avoids that it freezes to the surface underneath if wet
- Diamond pattern on the surface with small ribs to avoid getting slippery
- All corners of the pallets have elevated edges to have good stability of goods stacked on the pallet
- Two slits on the short side of the pallet for easy attachment of cling-film used for wrapping goods
- RFID-recessed areas on all 4 corners of the pallet
Celebrating Worldstar Awards
The World Packaging Organisation has organizedWorldStar awards since 1970, celebrating innovative packs worldwide. The WorldStar Competition is one of the major events of the World Packaging Organisation (WPO) and is the pre-eminent global award in packaging, showcasing the ongoing advances in packaging design and technology and creating a living standard of international packaging excellence from which others may learn. Each year WPO recognizes “the best of the best” in packaging innovations from across the globe. The objective of WPO in organizing WorldStar is to increase awareness of the importance of packaging and to respond to new challenges and global trends such as sustainability, hygiene, and other trends.
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Rick LeBlanc, EMBA, is the founder and editor of Reusable Packaging News (subscribe to the free newsletter) and editor of Western Pallet Magazine. A supply chain journalist with more than 30 years of experience, he specializes in pallets, reusable packaging, material handling and related operations. Rick is co-author of Pallets: A North American Perspective and Pallets & Progress: A Collected History of Pallets and Palletized Handling 1922–1945. He is also an advisory board member of the Virginia Tech Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design. Read Rick’s full bio.
