Sustainable agriculture and food production company Stahlbush Island Farms,Corvallis, OR, has launched what it says is the first-of-its-kind biodegradable bag for its frozen fruit and vegetable lines. Stahlbush says the bag is designed to biodegrade in months, rather than the hundreds of years it takes standard polyethylene packaging to break down.
The BioBag is a result of two years of collaboration between Stahlbush and Cadillac Products Packaging Co. Over the course of the project, a combination of manufacturing practices and processes with biodegradable materials allowed the BioBag to meet the necessary criteria to be a sustainable alternative to traditional flexible packaging, Stahlbush relates.
A key challenge was to create a biodegradable bag that maintains an acceptable shelf life for the 20 different frozen fruit and vegetable product lines produced at Stahlbush. This was achieved, the company says, by leveraging the exclusive properties of the brown kraft paper used by Stahlbush for its packaging and the water-based ink technology used on the BioBag.
