Earth First Films - Zack Leimkuehler / Kelly Williams

https://earthfirstfilms.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/zack-leimkuehler-2b08a432/

Is the future of sustainable packaging compostable? 
what if you could compost your sachet easily? 

Check out our sponsor Orora Packaging Solutions 
https://ororapackagingsolutions.com/

Check out our sponsor this month: 
https://smartsolve.com/

https://specright.com/ 
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1329820053/ref=as_sl_pc_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=corygat

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-connors/

I'm here to help you make your packaging more sustainable! Reach out today and I'll get back to you asap.

This podcast is an independent production and the podcast production is an original work of the author. All rights of ownership and reproduction are retained—copyright 2022.

Transcript

Cory Connors: 0:31

Welcome to Sustainable Packaging with Cory Connors . Today's guests are some of my friends from Earth First Films and really excited to get to know your products and what you guys do in the industry. Kelly, if you don't mind starting, we'll ask you to introduce yourself and tell us a little

kelly Williams: 0:47

bit about your background. Great. Thank you. Kelly Williams. I've been 27 years and I started out um, building today's severely over engineered plastics. Fossil plastics based packaging. And I joke that I'm spending the last half of my career, fixing that problem that I created by doing both mostly just compostable packaging. So for the last six years, I've done nothing but packaging engineering around compostable materials, beginning with Futamura who makes cellophane and that's just gone to where I'm at now. So, I have a pretty, pretty broad background in how to put these things together and in a way that they're commercially viable. That's excellent.

Cory Connors: 1:28

I've heard that a few times on this show people, regretting past, endeavors almost, but that's what was available for packaging. And so, I don't think we need to feel bad about it, but I think what we need to do is focus on, like you said, sustainable options today. All right, Zach, you're up, sir.

zack Leimkuehler: 1:46

Yeah. Yeah. Good to see you again, Corey. I'm Zach Leinkuhler, responsible for business development and product management within Earth First. I'm newly joined to Earth First, so, I actually have a paper background, so spent the first, 23 years of my career, making paper and living in the, the sustainable packaging world as it pertains to the paper role there. So, a new change for me coming over to the film side of things. but not a new. a new market, not a new concept when it comes to sustainability, in all this form and function as it relates to the packaging world. So, yeah, Kelly and I have worked together for, for quite a while in different, different roles, but never in the same company and always peripheral to each other. Cause we have a pretty strong passion for packaging and for sustainability. So it's been great to now in the last month, come together, working together under the same roof for the first time. So it's exciting. I love that

Cory Connors: 2:38

we go to these events and there's tens of thousands of people at Pack Expo and, hundreds or even thousands at other events and you see so many familiar faces. You see so many people that, that you've worked with for decades. it's such a cool industry to be a part of and to experience that. So well said. Zach, can you tell us about, Earth First Films and what your focus is?

zack Leimkuehler: 3:02

Yeah. Yeah. So, so Earth First Films is a, sustainable film company. So, our target is really to develop sustainable products as it relates to biofilms primarily. and as a Pertains especially to compostable structures and solutions. So we're a global company. we're located in headquartered out of Columbus, Ohio, but we have a manufacturing plant also in Belgium. So, so we have a global footprint and are able to service the industries we serve and our customers, with that global footprint. really, I think from our standpoint, sustainability is the platform. Thank you. we have a history of other products, but our company really, for the last 20 plus years has been spending a lot of time in, in research development, of how do you convert these new resins and these new materials into usable structures? so we were some of the first to be able to blow PLA films, have patents for how to do that. And I think we've. we were very early on in those stages and we continue to look for the right homes and the right places to put these sustainable materials and really bring them to the market as it pertains to our converter customers, the brand owners, the overall supply chain, and really, I think part of Kelly and I's focus here now is the education of the supply chain and how do we show them what's possible? And that's really where we get to, the new launch we have in the lamination division, which Kelly is leading, which is really about trying to bring. the solutions and the technologies that are out there in a commercially scalable form and really show the industry that they are there and they're ready to be used in a commercial fashion and really start to challenge that status quo a little bit more than has been done before.

Cory Connors: 4:46

That's great. You're exactly right. A lot of the industry is frustrated, with, the lack of information. The, the, what do we do next? how could we, what are the options here? so Kelly, can you speak to the laminations division and what's new about that? Are you focusing on, bio based materials, like Zach said?

kelly Williams: 5:06

A couple things on that. I would love to tell you more about it. So one of the first things I think that we're embracing here, and I know you can relate to this too, is there's this classic divide between paper and plastic, and you see it everywhere. It's just, it's like those worlds just don't really like to mingle or coalesce together, and we believe that to solve the decimal point problem of the challenge, the immensity of packaging used in packaged consumer goods, Look, we can't survive without packaged consumer goods. Otherwise, 8 billion people have to become overnight homesteaders, right? So we need it, but you can't sell a sustainable product in an unsustainable package. And if you're going to do that, you just can't build biopolymer plants fast enough. I look at biopolymers as the big Costco jar of peanut butter, but you got 5 billion pieces of bread to butter with it. And that bread is paper. So cellulosics and merging that together with biopolymers. Initially bringing them together, but eventually I think it's at the molecular level, these things actually get combined. but the genesis of the lamination division was really just clear and present frustration, no matter where you went from large brands, a small brand to converter, and I look back at my career and back in 2013, 2012, 2013, we justified it at Ashland. To buy a super combi full scale commercial laminator that can do everything, a million dollar investment where we're not manufacturers. We're an R and D. We're an adhesive manufacturer. But our point was 17 converters made up 64 percent of the market in North America. And if we're going to grow again, some of the larger adhesive manufacturers, we have to do their R and D work for them. And that's still the case, but today it's not 17 and 64%. It's 10 and like 85%. It's a much bigger. So there's been more consolidation, a lot more private equity. And I feel sorry for them. They have a hard challenge, right? Large legacy brands dominate their resources. They have to innovate and conventional packaging, recyclable packaging, post consumer content. When it comes to compostables, they're just hamstrung. they do one and done R and D at most you try something. It doesn't work. Do we understand why it didn't work? So it's that frustration. And I think what we're seeing is like this emerging of two buckets of discernible demographic. You've got this discernible bucket of supply chain. That could be brands, retailers, anybody in that downstream space. You have come to realize that compostable path is probably inevitable and there's a sense of urgency to do something about it Then there's another bucket that's I think growing faster, which is they may not be convinced It's inevitable, but there's certain to believe that there's a sense of urgency to understand. Is it an option? And that's where it really comes down to is how do you know, right? You got to know, does it work? And the only way to know if it works is to put it on a machine, put product in it, fill it, seal it, test it. That's what we're trying to speed up is the application development has got to be done faster and more efficiently with cumulative learning, not sporadic pieces of learning that you never can really bring together. So that's what we're trying to do is speed it up, speed up commercial adoption. When you

Cory Connors: 8:16

say bio, biopolymer, biobased, materials, what is that? What is that? Is it corn? Is it,

kelly Williams: 8:22

all of them. We really do because our genesis is in PLA and mastering blowing PLA film. So we have a bend towards really trying to do plant based polymers. But look, there's some synthetic compostable certified products that bring great property attributes to packaging. You can't ignore them. So we do try to always start with how much plant base can we build into it. But you can't cut your arm off going into a knife fight, right? You got to use what's available to, to make the right product. And we believe over time, we're just going to see more and more innovation on the material side. And hopefully we're building the apparatus that can turn it into something that's commercially viable downstream. Yeah.

Cory Connors: 9:04

Very interesting. Is it industrially compostable? Today,

kelly Williams: 9:09

same thing, right? we don't throw the baby out with the bath water and we don't bulldoze the daycare center into the river. So, we try to design everything for home compostable today. But there are just some attributes that we just can't get there yet. but I would say in general, and anyone deep in this industry would say. The development of home compostable options has been never more exciting. they're coming and they're almost to the point where we're seeing barrier properties that take all the excuses away, as we like to say internally.

zack Leimkuehler: 9:38

Yeah, that's like, yeah. And I think that's one of the, that's one of the really cool things about what we're trying to do is when you see what we can do and to Kelly's point that, there, there are really good. Materials out there and now with a wider breadth of knowledge and really to Kelly's point, a willingness to force fit things together and prove it. I think we're seeing, we're even more excited about what we're seeing. And I think, we're seeing things to Kelly's point that take an excuse away because the barrier levels and the performance measurements are that good, but we're also seeing things that work pretty well. That, maybe don't have that same performance, specification that, an industry has been built around, but really wasn't needed, but we're saying, boy, it doesn't have that. But when you actually do to Kelly's point, when you put it on a machine, when you put material in it and you test it, we're start, we're able to demonstrate now that you actually may not need all that, all that robust barrier that you thought you did. And so again, it's a really about taking that excuse away to say. if you, it, because certain applications, they absolutely need the barrier, so we can find places to get that barrier. Other applications are really comfortable with the security of that barrier, even though they don't really need it. So I think what we're able to do with the division that we're building is to show that. Put it in front of someone and with irrefutable data and evidence, show them that it's working, it is working. It is something that is a viable concept, even though the spec sheet may not look like what you're used to. Right.

Cory Connors: 11:46

Yeah. Excellent point. it's not going to be a business as usual anymore. We need to look at new alternatives and really stretch and push and try new things. Are any of these materials recyclable as well?

zack Leimkuehler: 12:01

Yeah. I think it's something that we've talked about. So, that, that is one of the magic parts of, Kelly and I become this two headed monster when we look at film and paper, because, as a paper person in my background and as a polymer science person in Kelly's background, we've talked for years about how do you thread that needle and find the solutions that do both. Because at the end of the day, the perception and the demand of what people are doing and how they're moving. Between the end of life debate. and I'll say it does move in our perspective. We've seen it swing from side to side, but if you can thread the needle in the middle, you've solved those problems and that's not possible everywhere, but I think we're finding that there are places where we believe we can thread that needle.

Cory Connors: 12:44

Exciting. Kelly, you have something

kelly Williams: 12:47

to add. You recyclable, right? We are returning them into the food chain. the recycling one is an interesting one and I think, what the term that nobody talks about, even the smart, really smart academics in the room. There's a term called entropy that nobody wants to talk about and entropy of recycling has its challenges. And I, I just think the reality of that pathway to continue to sustain the addiction to convenience, quite frankly, around packaged consumer goods. And trying to bring that back, little things like, like a little sachet of gummies, how many of those do I need to collect to get a ton of usable material? Those are real challenges. So I think where we're seeing it is some of the smaller format stuff, the sachets, the hard to hold, those are probably never going to be recycled in any positive way. So I think that's what we're seeing is. and quite frankly, when you're looking at recyclable, which means polyethylene based packaging, it does some things pretty well. It's getting better and better, but. the barrier we're able to get from mixing these different compostable materials together, we're able to hit performance thresholds that I just don't think you're ever going to get with polyethylene.

zack Leimkuehler: 14:00

Yeah, for sure. And to Kelly's point, I think that's, even my debate as a, from the papermaking side of the world in the past, recyclability becomes, the leverage point. For paper, but to Kelly's point, there's so many applications that people want to try to push that way that realistically will never be recyclable. they're either too small, they're too soiled, and you have to have a better, and again, debates are always good, you have to have a really good end of life. That's going to allow that to, to be, to have a end of life that's valuable versus, even though it's recyclable, never actually making it to that end. Right.

Cory Connors: 14:33

Well said. So how do we teach consumers what to do with it when they're

kelly Williams: 14:38

done with it? Do what Apple did when nobody wanted to pay 3, 000 for a MacBook. You put them in the schools. Right. It's generational. I love when people say, well, you're just encouraging littering. and I think that's a bit. Ridiculous to say, because if you're 25 years old, at that point in your life, you're either a litterer or you're not. Well said. I don't think this turns people into being litterers. So I think it starts generationally.

Cory Connors: 15:03

So show the kids how to compost at home with, even their sachets and things like that, right? Interesting. I like that. I, I spoke at my kid's school about packaging and about sustainability and they were totally interested. They were so excited. it was, he was in fourth grade at the time and you're right, the kids, the next generation, they want to help even college students that I've interviewed have been absolutely brilliant and excited about the future of sustainable packaging. So I think you're right. There's a lot

kelly Williams: 15:37

there. Yeah, and if you look at Crocs, I did a lot of campus speaking to and every university, either in the engineering or the arts and sciences department, environmental, environmental studies and all of its different forms is such a blossoming field with different specializations and it's all about building the, these, shepherds that are going to help drive us in the right direction later. And it's really exciting to me personally. And something else about that generation, they're not afraid to ask you anything. We grew up afraid to ask tough questions. They do not have that barrier.

zack Leimkuehler: 16:10

I agree. Yeah, and I think it's also becoming more and more, more and more visible in, in, in everyday life. I live in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Not known for having lots of, industrial compost sites, in different places. But even in Green Bay, Wisconsin, we are starting to have small businesses for, curbside compost pickup, you know that they're building and, you're starting to see more and more. People with, those facilities, backyard compost piles and things, even in places where maybe it wasn't always, the norm or something that was recognizable. I think you're starting to see it even in places where there's not, the infrastructure there on a large scale, but the thought process and the desire, and I think the education is starting to get to places already.

Cory Connors: 16:53

I'm noticing more municipalities picking up food waste as part of their service is the intent here and is the Holy Grail here that your packaging would go in with that. Materials? is that, would that be good news?

kelly Williams: 17:10

I think that's where a lot of people default to, right? think of like nut butter in a sachet, you'll never get that peanut butter out. Right? So, and that makes sense. I look at it a little differently, though. If you look at, if you really In real scale, redirected food waste to compost. That's a source of nitrogen. For every pound of nitrogen, you need 28 to 31 pounds of carbon. Where are you going to get your carbon? If you're in California, the lawn and gardening season is year round. You don't have that problem in New York City and Green Bay, Wisconsin. You might. I believe packaging is a legitimate source of carbon. For building the pile, not managing it as a nuisance to the pile. So I think that the overall demand for compost is where this is going. We've got a failing human gut biome. We've got regenerative agriculture that needs compost. You look at the value of compost overall. I think it's the demand for compost that drives, that's what's driving this. And I think packaging is a natural fit. Underneath fulfilling that demand

zack Leimkuehler: 18:13

and I think to that point to where, we look at places that are agricultural specific, right? So think of all of the packaging that goes into materials that end up right back at, in a, at a farm that in a lot of cases, farms are now building their own compost facilities as part of their amendment process to, to keep their, keep their business going. So, we had a conversation with, so a very large agricultural business in Ohio and the reality is, they have to actually go back and take packaging apart just to get things back in their system. It adds cost, it adds time, it adds labor, and so all those things can be really easily solved if you just start using packaging. It doesn't matter if it goes back and it's not a source of contamination. It's actually, to Kelly's point, a vital part of the mix that you need and the raw material inputs that you need. To have a healthy compost pile and have a healthy system. So yeah, I think to your question, Corey, yeah, for sure. We would, that would be a great thing to see that the start of packaging being just as important to the food scrap waste as the food scrap waste is in ending up not in a landfill and ending up in a place where it's better managed.

Cory Connors: 19:24

And could even be a source of energy, with that, I absolutely love that concept, where farms or ranches or municipalities are creating energy from this process, from the off gassing, we can, if we can grab hold of that and use it for something positive, wow, everybody wins,

zack Leimkuehler: 19:44

right? exactly. And I think it's when you look at some of these, the agricultural, businesses in America and the cost structures that they have. And, some of them are, that's really difficult position to be in. So saving them some saving them. Cost saving them some labor, saving that time is all valuable for them. So how do you make that much, much easier to go and create that compost stream for yourself, then not having to invest in deep packaging, right. and having to do things like that.

Cory Connors: 20:13

Well, this has been excellent guys. Anything else that you wanted to say before we wrap it up here?

kelly Williams: 20:19

we're ready to accelerate application development. So, anyone that listens to the podcast that wants to know what we're offering today, what we're capable of building. we believe that we can help spark that adoption by getting. Look, it's a low conversion rate business and it's slow, right? So for every 10 trials that you run, 0. 5 might end up being successful. If we can put, if we can do, for every trial, it's not one product. It's five or six well thought out solutions that we're going to put on the machine at the same time, our chances of technical success are going to go up a lot. And as technical success goes up, all of the concerns, the worries, the de risking, the opposition, all of that stuff can now be sorted out. To where what we're left with is, Oh my God, it works. It's more expensive. How do we solve that? It's a lot easier thing to solve when you can prove that it works. that's what we're trying to do.

zack Leimkuehler: 21:13

Yeah. and I think as we look at that and what is all of this, what good is all of this, if it doesn't lead to commercialization, right? if it doesn't lead to actually being utilized, it's a lot of, it's a lot of time and effort that's, that could be put in other directions. So, I think one of the things Kelly and I talk a lot about with this, the lamination division is. it is, we are driving towards speeding up the commercialization process, speeding up the application development processes as Kelly said, and really taking the excuses away because we've, I think, in past discussions, we've all had, regardless of the material industry you come from, really great projects from a sustainability standpoint that failed because of. Something easily preventable, whether it's an aesthetic, whether it's a, Hey, it didn't run on this one piece of equipment that I have trial time on instead of the one it will end up on. Right. there's so many parts that just become roadblocks and they're all small. But by the end of the time, you just can't get through them. And I think really, we're trying to take that and break that Mindset, break that supply chain up and really redirect it and force it to see what can be done, and show people what could be done. So, yeah, we're excited. Yeah,

kelly Williams: 22:25

I was going to say like another part to that is co packers, right? you would think that large brands have complete control over their co pack. Co packers have a lot of control in the supply chain. And if they don't want it to be successful, it's not going to be. Right. So you have to go there with them. You have to help, like, we just have to, that's it. That's a truth. That we have to address head on. So I think the more we attention, we give them in these trials, the more open they're going to be to making those subtle adjustments. And eventually it won't be long before the equipment companies are building machines for compostable solutions, because they understand them now.

zack Leimkuehler: 23:00

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Again, I think even today, about an hour ago, Kelly and I ran a call with a potential customer and their first question was, Oh, has this been on, has this been on a line yet? the ability to say yes, automatically gets you past several of those hurdles. And that's what we're really trying to solve. So I think there's some, there's a lot of cumulative learning. I think going back to the way Kelly opened, there's a lot of cumulative learning we're trying to now put and stack into top of each other so that we can progress a lot further and faster.

kelly Williams: 23:29

Like,

Cory Connors: 23:29

and you mentioned cost, you can't have a low cost without big scale and you can't have big scale without success. So it's, we're in a catch 22 right now with a lot of these sustainable, innovations, but I appreciate you guys doing that work and keeping it going because, we're going to need these options. Perfect. Yeah. what's the best way for people to get in touch with you?

kelly Williams: 23:52

Yeah. So,

zack Leimkuehler: 23:53

we, you can go to our website, earthfirstfilms. com, earthfirstfilms slash laminations is, is the landing page for a laminations, division. again, Drop some information there. We would love to talk. You understand what you're trying to do and how we bring the solutions we've got to test for you with Kelly and I are on LinkedIn as well. So you can find us there and drop us a message. we Kelly and I love our network love the connections to our early conversation, whether you see each other at Pack Expo or whatever. Confidence you're at. It's great to catch up with people and talk about what's new and compare notes on what we're learning. So yeah, by all means, reach out to us and let us see what we can come up with.

Cory Connors: 24:31

Right. Thank you, Zach. thank you, Kelly. Really appreciate this. Thanks Corey. Thanks Corey.