If you go into a supermarket and pick up any box of breakfast cereal from the shelf, the chances are it will have a bag inside it made of plastic that contains your cereal of choice. I have recently discovered that the amount of plastic used to make these bags can be reduced by 10-15% by simply changing the way that the bags are sealed. You’ll find that most of these cereal bags have a crimped seal at the top and bottom that is about 15mm wide. But by using a new method off sealing called the Integrity Seal ™ you can actually close the bag with a seal that is just 1.5mm wide. What’s more, the new seal is stronger and less likely to fail than the crimp seal so products will not leak from the bag and should stay fresher for longer.

Surely there will be a very high capital outlay to change to a machine that is capable of making such a seal? Well the inventors of the technology say that the technology can be retrofitted onto many form fill seal machines, so there’s no need to replace the whole thing which should make the cost of implementing this system more manageable. I spoke to Ceetak, the company who manufacture these retrofit solutions and they told me that although the technology was originally made with salad bags in mind via a project with WRAP, there is no reason why the sealing system should not work for cereal packets too. So today I will send them some samples of the sort of packs we make on our machines, they will reseal them for me using the Integrity seal ™ system and send them back to me so that we can assess the seal quality and overall look of the product and potential material and cost savings and decide whether we want to go any further with the project. I’m hopeful that this could be the next step in minimising the amount of packaging we use so I will post more about this when I have some results…