When is a bag not just a bag? When it has gone through rigorous testing, is the result of scientific studies and has been manufactured from a bespoke paper manufactured to withstand a number of extremely specific conditions. That is the outcome of the Detpak/Felixton Paper Mill collaboration, a grocery bag manufactured from SustainaBag™, which is now used by the majority of South Africa’s leading food and other retailers for their home deliveries, including the popular Checkers Sixty60 service.
The background goes back to well before the COVID-19 pandemic when there was already a movement to paper bags, especially in the QSR sector, as a result of retailers and consumers eager to reduce the use of single-use plastics.There was also a growing interest among major food retailers in particular to start providing a home delivery service as an added convenience factor for their customers.
Detpak South Africa, a joint project between Mpact and the Australian-based Detmold Group, set to work on designing a bag that could specifically meet the requirements of the market. As a start, it manufactured paper bags with handles that could be conveniently carried home by consumers from either a fast-food outlet or grocery store.
To ensure that the product could endure the trip home, and cope with carrying at least one either frozen or cold item, Detpak subjected its bags to extensive trials, including testing for strength to withstand the rigours of the journey home, and a certain degree of condensation resistance. However, at that stage none of the paper grades they tested met the required performance standards or was both fully recyclable and made from recycled fibre.
Seeking a suitable solution, Detpak approached the Felixton Paper Mill, which produces a range of papers using recycled fibre, for assistance. After numerous brainstorming sessions, aided by local and European paper chemical suppliers, several trials were conducted by the mill.
Before long, the mill succeeded in manufacturing a paper that was not only fully recyclable, and made from recycled fibre, but which was also able to withstand moisture to a certain degree. This is an essential element of the bags produced from the paper that often contain one or two frozen items, or cold products such as bottles of milk, which produce condensation during the delivery trip.
As a result of this deep collaboration and in keeping with the aim of closing the loop, SustainaBag™ was launched into the market by the Felixton Paper Mill in mid-2020. However, it soon became clear to Detpak that there was an increasing demand for a bigger bag without handles that could be folded close. This was driven by the pandemic, when there was a sudden and dramatic upsurge in home deliveries in the fastfood delivery market, with food retailers clearly keen to follow suit with grocery home deliveries.
When approached by Shoprite Checkers for a fully sustainable solution, the Detpak team was thus ready to offer the customer a solution that met their needs. The significant growth of the Sixty60 bag with the SustainaBag™ paper was instrumental in setting an industry standard.
SustainaBag™ has been optimised to maximise resistance to water penetration and provides a fit-for-purpose solution for the grocery bag application whilst being completely recyclable and biodegradable. When this single ply paper is used to make standard bag sizes it can handle a load bearing mass of more than 10kg. Benchmarking of the paper to other recycled fibre grades available in the market indicate that the sheet has excellent capacity to withstand shock when subjected to high tension as well as high resistance of breaking under tension.
Since then, SustainaBag™ has had substantial uptake from many of South Africa’s leading food and other retailers. With recent state-of-theart investments at Felixton enabling the mill to meet ever-growing demand for the substrate, Detpak has also added significant capacity to manufacture the bags. And while other bag manufacturers may have since entered this booming market, SustainaBag™ remains the paper of choice.
To fully close the loop, Detpak, in collaboration with Mpact Recycling, has hosted an educational campaign, “Recycling in the bag”, to educate waste pickers on the recyclability of the bags to ensure they do collect them along with other recyclables so that the bags fulfil their ultimate destiny: being made into other recycled-based products via Mpact’s full recycling process.
“SustainaBag™ is the proud result of Detpak and Mpact being proactive, understanding early on that demand for paper bags would escalate given the pandemic, and a sincere desire to provide a sustainable solution to displace single use plastic that is both environmentally-friendly and cost effective.”
Success leads to success!
The investment at the mill included an upgraded automated gluing system, and the in-house development of a specialised mandrel able to handle the paper’s smaller core sizes at the mill’s automated reel warehouse – currently the only one of its kind in the southern hemisphere. The design of the mandrel resulted in the Felixton Paper Mill winning an internal Southern Cross Award. Thanks to their constant efforts, the mill also achieved a record run on SustainaBag™ in November of this year, an outstanding achievement.