New Law Marks 2022 as First Year of a Circular Economy in Japan-Part 3

摘要

Japan’s packaging market is notable for its widespread use of functional packaging, employing composite materials with advanced barrier properties. And given this environment, it could be described as a market where it is di?cult for materials that do not meet this mold to gain a foothold. But with the country recently putting its Plastic Resource Circulation Act into effect, momentum is picking up toward monomaterial packaging as an alternative here. It is not as if the Japanese packaging market has been completely without monomaterial packaging, with examples of simple polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene (PE) monomaterial packaging having existed here for some time. Now, however, various players in the Japanese supply chain are following Europe in a new trend toward monomaterial packaging, prompting a raft of efforts to adopt monomaterial designs for barrier packaging materials.