Cullen Packaging has unveiled the Fibre Bottle, a sustainable alternative to plastic bottles and pouches to accommodate demands from food and beverage and healthcare industries.
The Fibre Bottle is designed for dry goods, and should enable brands producing goods such as vitamins, supplements, dry foods, home care and horticultural products to remove 270m single-use plastic bottles or pouches from shelves per year.
The Scottish innovator said the Fibre Bottle is made from 100% natural matter, recycled cardboard and water, and is biodegradable and compostable, in comparison to its counterpart plastic that will leave a 200-1000 year legacy in landfills.
The Fibre Bottle should be shelf-ready at scale, with Cullen already producing hundreds of millions of moulded fibre bottles for the healthcare sector across 34 countries globally.
Whereas the Fibre Bottle is launched in one design iteration, thanks to Cullen’s bespoke service, the innovator can create any size or colour or any packaging design wanted by Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) brands.
Within one month, the firm’s in-house design, engineering and manufacturing teams should be able to create a bespoke moulded fibre alternative for most plastic packaging, of which the Fibre Bottle is the latest example.
Cullen said that, upon approval, the sustainable units can be made affordably and quickly at a commercial scale, so that more brands than ever will be able to seamlessly replace plastic with its sustainable alternatives.
“This is a game changer,” said Cullen owner David MacDonald. “While there are some great pilot and small-scale plastic-free bottle innovations, the Fibre Bottle by Cullen is the only one that can be produced affordably at a commercial scale.”
“The fibre-based packaging market is £8.65bn per year and we’re already one of its most established, major players,” he went on. “Our ability to design, engineer and manufacture over one billion plastic-free products since 2020 from our UK facility makes us one of the global leaders in this space.”
“And we can produce 270 million Fibre Bottles per year from today. It’s not just bright innovation and smart design that will allow us to remove single-use plastic from shelves, but expert manufacturing at a real scale and a cost that rivals or beats the alternatives. And that’s where Cullen is at already.”
“In single-use packaging, carbon footprint and general eco-friendliness of moulded fibre products are significantly better when compared to plastic,” said Sian Sutherland, co-founder of the environmental services company A Plastic Planet.
“For a single-use packaging product of the same size and functionality, moulded fibre has a 63% lower CO2 emission as compared to polystyrene and a 150% lower as compared to PET.”
Cullen is a business that has the potential to eliminate billions of pieces of toxic, indestructible plastic and sees no limit to the positive impact it can drive. Ideas are a start, but implementation is everything. Cullen’s ability to scale rapidly and execute a big vision gives us hope that we can stop huge amounts of damage being done to the planet.”
Cullen said it is driving a replacement of plastic packaging, being Europe’s only combined manufacturer of moulded fibre and corrugate packaging.
Its products come in all shapes, sizes and colours, protecting everything from avocados and coffee to laptops, vacuums, expensive wine and much more.
The company itself uses a closed-loop recycling system that utilises the waste they produce from their corrugated manufacturing process to make their moulded fibre products, including The Fibre Bottle.
