All our polymers are now positioned under a single portfolio brand: Signature Polymers. We will be making these modifications over the next six months so you will see both old and new grade names highlighted moving forward.
Do more with less
The journey to reduce packaging thickness – e.g film downgauging – started a while ago and is enabled by materials like Exceed™. It is still going very strong for two main reasons:
- The portfolio of enabling molecules keeps expanding and pushing the envelope of film performance – Exceed™, Exceed™ XP and now Exceed™ S performance PE.
- Extrusion equipment – keeps progressing – from one layer 20 years ago, 3 layers were the standard about 10 years ago, and now the standard is becoming 5 layers and we are seeing more and more installations of film orientating equipment that can help boost film stiffness – such as MDO machine direction orientation, and BOPE biaxially oriented films.
Through this combination of improvements we estimate that over the last 10 years, and across a sampling of ~30 packaging applications, the average film thickness has decreased ~2 to 3% per year, year-on-year. On the basis of that data, we estimate that through the use of performance PE, the film industry helped to avoid the consumption of ~1.3 MT (1.3 MT) of plastic for the year 2021 alone vs. 2010 reference! (ExxonMobil analysis, aggregated numbers across 30 film segments and sub-segments).
