As a trade bindery in the Printing Industry we package a number of our finished products in shrink film. Shrink film can take hundreds of years to biodegrade.

In our ongoing search for environmentally friendly products, we have found a new biodegradable shrink film.  It is a polyolefin heat shrink film that degrades over a 3 to 5 year period (as compared to a regular shrink film product that can take hundreds of years in the landfill to decompose).

Sourcing this product in North America was a significant challenge.  We had to go global!  The product is used in the U.K. and that’s where we first found it; but it is manufactured in France. We tracked it to the U.S. and found a sales office in Eastern U.S. who was handling it.  We’re from the West Coast of Canada so we needed to locate a distributor closer to us.  We found one in Edmonton, Alberta.

After running some trials (and making some equipment changes), we are extremely pleased with how well the product runs and performs.  It has good sealing and shrinkage properties at low temperatures and can run on both manual and automatic equipment.

The film degrades at the end of its useful life: it fragments and oxidizes through the long term effect of light and heat. It then becomes assimilated by the soil and eventually disappears in the landfill, leaving only water, carbon dioxide and biomass.

Do the right thing: use environmentally friendly packaging materials!