The pressure-sensitive label industry is not without its challenges, and one major concern is environmental: as label liners have moved from paper to PET, they’ve become harder to dispose of. For the past decade, the majority of Australia’s liner waste was sent to China but the Chinese government banned what it called ‘foreign garbage’ last year.
Currently, close to 300 million square metres of liner enters unsustainable landfills in Oceania each year, mostly made up of PET film, glassine paper, and polypropylene products.
As Jake Nelson reports in the latest issue of Print21 magazine, sorting out the problem is easier said than done.