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Column: Colgate-Palmolive Competes on Toothpaste, not Tube

Colgate-Palmolive’s breakthrough toothpaste tube, on pace to be fully rolled out by 2025, is certified as recyclable by the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR).

Toothpaste Colgate Copy

Colgate-Palmolive’s breakthrough toothpaste tube, on pace to be fully rolled out by 2025, is certified as recyclable by the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR). Its designers cleverly eliminated aluminum foil as the barrier layer in favor of a thin layer of EVOH that’s included in the multilayer LDPE body. By doing so, they made the tube welcome at Municipal Recycling Facilities, where tubes containing foil layers have always been a problem. Also important, they sacrificed neither barrier properties nor the familiar hand feel that consumers know and expect. And maybe most important from a recycling standpoint is that the multi-layer material works satisfactorily in the #2 curbside recycling stream because once it’s ground up, its materials match the HDPE stream. Visit this link for more on that.

Making it even more interesting is that Colgate intends to share it across the industry.

“From day one, this was never about Colgate having a recyclable tube. It was about the industry having a recyclable tube,” said Tom Heaslip, Worldwide Director, Global Packaging, Colgate-Palmolive Co., during our December conversation. “If Colgate did it alone, it wasn’t going to move the needle with regard to tubes getting recycled.”

Of course, patents on Colgate’s recyclable toothpaste tube material are pending. But the notion that the HDPE recycle stream was likely the most fruitful route to this achievement has been known to the industry since the #2 stream existed. Protecting an open secret would have been counterproductive, especially if industry-wide adoption was a goal. Colgate-Palmolive instead has been actively engaging with suppliers, taking a leadership role of coaching and coaxing converters and materials vendors towards the HDPE stream.

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