Just three years ago, a waste crisis broke out when apartments in metropolitan areas throughout South Korea experienced a months-long halt in vinyl, mixed plastics and recyclable waste collection. This situation illustrates the severity of today’s waste problem where, on a daily basis, more new waste is being created than eliminated. In response, the South Korean government tightened regulations on recycling, and both consumers and companies began to join efforts that reduce plastics. CJ CheilJedang is also striving to reduce plastic usage while strengthening recycling potential. As a result, CJ CheilJedang has made many eco-friendly changes to its product packaging.
Making Non-reusable Bottles Obsolete With an Eco-friendly Redesign
Although it is important to properly sort recyclable waste before disposal, not all separated waste can actually be recycled. Some waste has properties that allow them to be recycled well, while others don’t, meaning these products can’t be recycled even if they are appropriately discarded. This is why it is critical to make sure the packaging itself is recyclable from the beginning of the production stage. Accordingly, CJ CheilJedang signed a voluntary Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Ministry of Environment for the use of easy-to-recycle packaging materials, and decided to improve the substance and structure of its packaging materials by 2019.
After signing the agreement, the first step CJ CheilJedang took was to change the color of its high-quality cooking oils’ plastic bottle. Previously, colored plastic bottles were used for olive, canola and grape seed oil since they are harvested, natural products whose color may vary depending on production period.
Using colored plastic bottles can reduce product variations, but they make recycling difficult. This is because when colored and colorless plastic bottles are mixed, the color differences become tough to manage making recycling impossible. To resolve this problem, CJ CheilJedang redesigned its packing material to be easily recyclable by removing the color in the plastic bottles. During the redesign process, the company also reduced the amount of plastic used in each bottle and made the packaging lighter. Thanks to these changes, CJ CheilJedang has succeeded in reducing its plastic usage while also making plastic bottles easy to reuse.
Consumer Feedback Leading to Strengthened Recyclability
After changing the color and reducing the amount of plastic used in each bottle, it seemed that the new packaging would not be difficult to recycle. However, opinions from actual CJ CheilJedang high-quality oil consumers told a different story. Because the product label attached to the plastic bottles could not be easily removed, the packaging was still difficult to recycle. Consequently, the consumers requested for CJ CheilJedang to replace the label with one that could be easily removed.
Based on these consumer feedbacks, CJ CheilJedang expanded its application of water-soluble adhesives that, at the time, were only used on a few items. As the name suggests, water-soluble adhesives quickly melt in water making labels easy to remove during the recycling process of plastic bottles even if some label residue remains.
However, when using water soluble adhesives, the rate of production slows. Again, CJ CheilJedang turned to product design as a means to resolve this issue. The company changed the bottle shape so the label can be attached more efficiently, and adjusted the shape of its cap to reduce plastic usage by 10%. As a result, this new design not only lightened the weight of the bottle cap and body, but helped CJ CheilJedang reduce its plastic usage on each component by 50 tons and 111 tons, respectively. By implementing a lighter container and water-soluble label adhesive, the product packaging was reborn as an easy-to-recycle bottle.
The application of water-soluble adhesives, which began with consumer feedback, has now expanded to other CJ CheilJedang products. In 2021, the company applied the technology and know-how accumulated through the high-quality cooking oil bottle redesign to introduce water-soluble labels on additional products including soybean oil, fish sauce, salad dressing, starch syrup, caramelized sugar syrup, vinegar and cooking wine. As a result, more plastic bottles can now be recycled.
Gift Sets That Give Back to the Environment
Beyond high-quality cooking oil, CJ CheilJedang has now extended its application of eco-friendly packaging to other products such as soybean oil, fish sauce and salad dressing. However, this isn’t the first time that CJ CheilJedang has changed its products’ packaging to be more eco-friendly. Gift sets that were first introduced in the 1950s have undergone continuous transformations throughout the years.
In the early 2000s, CJ CheilJedang used high-quality and premium functional materials with a metal gloss in its gift set packaging, and transitioned to using biomaterials, such as rice hulls, from the mid-to-late 2000s. In 2013, based on the practical knowledge gained while developing its rice hull processing technique, CJ CheilJedang introduced packaging with a natural color and texture made with leftover wheat hulls, a by-product of flour production.
In 2019, in a move towards adopting a circular economy, CJ CheilJedang attempted to shift the focus of its technology toward easy-to-recycle packaging. The company spent three years developing an upcycling technology for reusing plastic residues created during the manufacturing of plastic containers. As a result, CJ CheilJedang successfully processed the plastic residues into a gift set tray and increased its composition of recycled materials by 20%. Based on the knowledge gained during this development process, the company can increase the use of recycled materials in its packaging to upwards of 50%.
Moreover, CJ CheilJedang reduced plastic usage in gift sets by introducing a tray that was designed to minimize the space between products. But the company has not only changed the tray, it has also refashioned other packaging materials used in gift sets into reusable materials. Previously, its gift sets were put inside a nonwoven fabric bag made with plastic material, but now the company has replaced it with a paper shopping bag.
CJ CheilJedang is taking on various efforts to actualize a sustainable circular economy based on 3R (redesign, recycle, recover). The redesign of Premium cooking oil and gift set packages is representative of 3R’s ‘recycle’, making it easier for consumers to recycle products even after they have used them. CJ CheilJedang is practicing environmentally friendly actions by reducing its plastic usage and boosting product recyclability. In the next story, CJ Newsroom will explore other ways in which CJ CheilJedang is practicing eco-friendliness.
