An Exclusive Interview with Mr. Bhavesh Gandhi, Sr. Global Product Line Manager at Milliken, Innovating for Circularity: Milliken’s Proactive Approach to Addressing Sustainability Challenges
An Exclusive Interview with Mr. Bhavesh Gandhi, Sr. Global Product Line Manager at Milliken, Innovating for Circularity: Milliken’s Proactive Approach to Addressing Sustainability Challenges
In the evolving landscape of plastic packaging, Milliken is taking a proactive approach to address sustainability challenges. As a major global player in plastics additives, the company recognizes the critical need for a holistic strategy toward plastic circularity.
Their approach goes beyond traditional manufacturing, focusing on innovative solutions that reduce waste, improve recyclability, and minimize environmental impact. By developing advanced additives and collaborating across the value chain, is helping brands reimagine packaging design, material selection, and end-of-life considerations.
From creating crystal-clear polypropylene to reducing processing energy, the company is committed to driving meaningful change in the plastics industry.
We interacted with Mr. Bhavesh Gandhi, Sr. Global Product Line Manager, overseeing the Millad additive platform within Milliken’s Chemical Division. He explains his company’s strategy toward circularity in the packaging sector via their vast product portfolio.
What is Milliken’s approach to plastic packaging as a major global player in the plastics additive space?
Plastic packaging is incredibly useful for consumer brands globally, helping solve issues related to food transportation and security, shelf life and stability, general safety, and hygiene. Yet, plastic packaging can create significant waste after its usable life and must be appropriately addressed in order to alleviate this challenge. Supporting a circular economy for plastics with consistent and reliable solutions is therefore critical.
Addressing plastics circularity means accounting for the entire value chain—from resin development all the way to end- of-life disposal and back again. There needs to be a concerted effort, drawing from a range of solutions, applied at each stage of the packaging lifecycle. No one solution can tackle plastic waste headon; we need a holistic approach from the industry working together.
Milliken recognizes this need and convenes both customers and partners as they work to address the circular economy for plastics. They believe a systematic approach will require them to change how they look at design, end-of-life, and material sourcing to adequately contribute to this conversation. Their approach is defined by positioning Milliken’s additive portfolio as a valuable tool in designing for circularity.
Whether it is creating additive platforms that enable the use or increase the use of recycled materials, working with customers and brand owners to develop mono-material packaging, or developing ways to enhance plastic performance while decreasing material usage, Milliken additives can play a role in increasing plastic packaging circularity.
You mentioned the concept of mono-material packaging. What is this, and why do brands consider this a viable solution?
Mono-material packaging is exactly that— creating a packaging system made from a single polymer, including elements like caps and labels. The idea is that the entire packaging system could be recycled as is, without extra steps like removing labels or recycling only specific components.
When utilizing polypropylene (PP), considered to be widely recyclable, mono-material packaging is highly compatible with current recycling methodologies and reduces some of the recycling barriers consumers face. However, many converters and brand owners are worried about packaging performance when considering mono-material options. This is where Milliken additives can help.
For example, PP is naturally hazy and lacks the clarity typically desired for packaging use. With Milliken’s Millad NX 8000 clarifying agent, PP can take on crystal-clear properties for heightened performance—making it a suitable replacement for polystyrene (PS) plastic when considering inter-material replacement, as PS is typically clearer but often less compatible with recycling infrastructure.
Mono-material packaging can also be a good solution for high-density polyethylene (HDPE) packaging that requires protective barrier layers. Metalized barrier layers can be difficult-to-recycle but the use of Milliken’s UltraGuard 2.0 technology can simplify packaging design by offering the possibility of removing metallized layers and increasing compatibility with current recycling systems.
Improve barrier properties with UltraGuard
The type of plastic matters when designing a packaging solution. What’s one consideration that can be overlooked when considering the plastic industry?
Milliken has had a lot of discussion on the actual weight of packaging solutions themselves. Weight can translate to higher transportation costs and is directly related to how much raw material is needed to actually make the packaging. Selecting an alternative plastic may reduce both raw material usage and weight.
Polystyrene (PS) plastic is often used in packaging because of its transparency, but its density is higher than that of PP. Switching from PS to PP packaging can translate to a lower-weight packaging product due to a reduction of raw materials, provided the right structural design and material selections are in place. One inter-material replacement project Milliken was involved in created PP chocolate boxes that would replace the original PS version. The switch resulted in a 42% raw material savings and a 55% weight reduction when comparing the PP and PS boxes.
The switch makes even more sense when you utilize an enhanced PP resin. This same project used a PP resin clarified with Millad NX 8000, which helped PP match the existing solution’s optical properties. The right additive package can enable your inter-material replacement initiative to meet or exceed existing performance specifications while gaining greater recycling compatibility.
Milliken’s UltraGuard solution can also help bring about raw material reductions for HDPE pharmaceutical bottles. Barrier performance for these bottles is critical for protecting contents and extending the potency of the medicines or nutraceuticals found inside. Typically, this meant creating pharmaceutical bottles with thicker walls. Using HDPE enhanced with UltraGuard allows bottle makers to reduce the weight of the final bottle by up to 20% while still retaining barrier performance.
Features of Milliken’s UltraGuard solutions include: lower bottle weight, less environmental impact, enhanced barrier properties, and longer shelf life.
Plastic resins incorporating recycled content seem like an obvious circularity win, but the hurdles for use discourage the industry. What are the challenges?
Incorporating post-consumer recycled content into new products is one of the most identifiable ways to support circularity principles, yet a few challenges sometimes discourage its use. PP resins with recycled content may not match the performance characteristics of virgin resins, and in certain applications like automotive parts, that lack of performance goes against industry standards. Recycled resins also have processing challenges, like unfavorable melt-flow rates and high variability in molding conditions.
Performance modifiers like Milliken’s DeltaMax or their suite of viscosity modifiers can improve the processing of recycled PP resin, addressing melt-flow properties and shortening production cycles so it can be used more broadly. DeltaMax can also enhance the overall performance of recycled PP, including maximizing impact resistance without compromising stiffness. When a converter can offer a way forward from the shortcomings of recycled resins, brand owners are more likely to consider adopting a resin with higher levels of recycled content.
We’ve spoken about designing for and supporting circularity at a product level. Are there macro ways to think about designing for circularity?
The plastics value chain encompasses many moving parts, from creating resin to potentially incorporating recycled content into new resin products. However, alongside product-driven work is the infrastructure supporting the development, conversion, forming, and distribution of plastic products. Considering manufacturing and production impacts is yet another element of designing for circularity.
Here, too, Milliken can support a solution. They’ve created additive solutions that address the physical properties of plastics while minimizing processing challenges to achieve optimal performance. Lowering processing temperatures or shortening cycle times requires less energy to create plastic products, including packaging, with two of their solutions—Millad NX 8000 and Hyperform—being UL Environmental Claim Validation (ECV)-certified to reduce processing energy usage by up to 10% and 8%, respectively.
Value-chain impacts are an important consideration in the quest for plastic circularity. Why is Milliken considering plastics industry impact solutions?
Milliken is considering broad-reaching metrics like value chain emissions because they are essential for their operations as well. With the announcement of their approved Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) net-zero targets5, Milliken is working toward a net-zero future by 2050. SBTi’s Net-Zero Standard is a framework for organizations to set science-based, net-zero targets that align with climate science and is inclusive of all emissions. Milliken has spent time understanding its scope 1, scope 2, and scope 3 emissions data as they chart their progress toward net-zero.
Scope 2 emissions account for indirect emissions related to purchased electricity, heat, or steam, while scope 3 emissions are all other indirect emissions from both upstream and downstream activity. As Milliken accounts for their scope 2 and 3 emissions and develop strategies to mitigate those emissions, they are considering how their products can contribute positively to emission-reduction work undertaken by their customers and end users.
About Mr. Bhavesh Gandhi : Mr. Bhavesh Gandhi is Sr. Global Product Line Manager, overseeing the Millad additive platform within Milliken’s Chemical Business. He has 20 years of experience in clarification and nucleation technologies for polyolefins.
Bhavesh holds his master’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Missouri, Rolla. He completed his MBA in International Business at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.
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