Stabilisation adhesive eliminates the need for stretch wrap

High shear strength adhesive applied to collated loads eliminates the need for pallet stretch wrap and other stabilisation aids.

In Use – In use in the UK food and drinks industry

Selected Filters (click to expand/collapse)

Benefits
Packaging Reduction

Product Categories
Drinks, Food, Home Improvement, Household & Personal Care

Relevant Materials
Adhesives

Relevant Packaging Formats
Pallets, Shrink and stretch wrap, Other

Supply Chain Phase
Packing

Details

An American company has developed a range of spray-on adhesives which have high shear strength but come apart easily when lifted from above. The adhesive is water based, non-toxic and biodegradable.

The adhesive is spray applied to packs at the palletisation stage and the adhesive quickly dries locking the packs together. Once dry the pallet is very stable and in many applications the pallet will not require any further stabilisation aids such as stretch wrap, corner boards or banding. The load is taken apart by simply lifting packs which come apart with a characteristic "popping" noise. The adhesive residue is invisible and does not mark packs. It has no adverse effect on the recyclability of the packaging materials used.

The manufacturer offers a number of different formulations for use with various packaging formats such as plastics and paper.

The product is approved for food and drinks use by the American FDA and the applicator equipment complies fully with CE and Health and Safety regulations.

The product is marketed in the UK by Lock n' Pop Limited.

Potential Benefits

This product has great potential to reduce packaging used in pallet stabilisation by eliminating the need to use stretch wrap, corner boards and banding to stabilise palletised loads in transit. The adhesive is very light and a few grammes will stabilise a standard pallet load. This represents a very large potential saving in material as recent research commissioned by WRAP identified that in the UK food and drinks industry many companies are using around 300 grammes of stretch wrap pet pallet.

Intellectual Property

Lock n' Pop is a registered trademark of Key Tech Corp of the USA.

Consultant View

Although this product has been available in the UK for some time it has not achieved widespread adoption. This may be partly due to reluctance on the part of suppliers to switch to a new technology. It also appears that retailers have mixed feelings on accepting pallets stabilised with adhesives. Some have H&S policies which dictate that pallets are wrapped with stretch film prior to warehousing whilst others are very positive about adhesives and their potential to remove waste packaging from the supply chain. Recent WRAP research has identified that around 77,000 tonnes of stretch film is used by the UK food and drinks industry per year. If a positive concensus view can be achieved palletisation adhesives could remove very large quantities of pallet wrap from the supply chain.

The REID database features many other technologies which aim to reduce the materials used for palletisation. Researchers interested in this aspect should search the REID database using search terms such as "pallets"; "palletisation"; "stretch wrap" and "light-weighting".

Contacts and Further Information

Duncan Potter, MD

Lock n' Pop Limited

Bond House

Hardwicke Road

Great Gransden

Sandy Bedfordshire

SG19 3BJ

Tel: 01767 677883

Email: duncan.potter@gransden.org