Recyclable Label Backers / Brandon Gomes / Label Craft

https://labelcraft.com/

Did you know that 30,000 truckloads of label backer material goes to the landfill every year? 
What if you could curbside recycle your label backer material? 
Only 7-10% of release liner gets recycled today. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandongomes/

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/packaging-today-show/id1656906367

Join Us Live Daily on LinkedIn Or YouTube or listen at your leisure on Apple or Spotify 

Packaging Today Podcast 

https://open.spotify.com/show/6dksVwqEFVDWdggd27fyFF?si=e924995740f94e19

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

0:15

Welcome to sustainable packaging with Cory Connors . Today's guest is my friend, Mr. Brandon Gomes, who is the sales and marketing manager at label craft. Hey Brandon, how you doing? Good. Are you sir? Good. Good. Thank you for having me. I I'm very excited because your product is so unique and, and you're, you're just a great person in this industry , to know. And I think what you're doing is a game changer for, for people, because oftentimes they don't understand that their label backers are not recyclable easily. So we'll, we'll get to that. But I want to start with your background. How did you get into this amazing world of sustainable? Yeah. Great. Great. So again, thank you for having me on here. Yeah, again, you're doing a great job with the bog gas and keep going. So thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Yeah, so, so myself, my background, I I started out my career in actually finance many, many, many years ago. I was doing that for a bit and then ended up wanting to get more into the sales side of things. Just, you know, love talking to people and getting out there and communicating and finding solutions and what. Went to a large office supply company, we'll say started out there kind of at the bottom customer service. You know, I saw, you know, way of getting my foot in the door, sort of working my way up to inside sales account management, business development, managed a sales team did that for about 10 years. And then I went over to FedEx office, which is sort of the print division to FedEx. So it was two years there with them. Was there a Canadian sales manager? So I had to. Sales guys and girls up here in Canada did that for a couple of years and then ended up connecting with Brian Tomlinson. Who's the owner of label craft had sat down with him and, and sorta talked about labels. Again, labels are labels and everyone labels they're everywhere. What really got me was his passion about what he had developed. So he had come out and, and sort of. Found a solution, we'll call it a solution to liner label release liner. And again, at that time, I didn't really, you know, I was big on sustainability in terms of trying to find ways to reduce and reuse and recycle and all that. Right. Just like everyone else. But after I met with him it kind of like I had a light go off and I was like, he's got something amazing here. So, you know, he walked me through the process and he was very passionate. And I never really thought about it at that time in terms of labels and , the release liner, how much really ends up in our landfill. I don't think a lot of people realize that. So yeah, so I saw an opportunity and he had such a great idea. He's invented it. He just got up. We've got a patent on. Canadian U S patent with a you're appending. And, and I was just like, this is unbelievable. This is a game changer for the label industry. So up until that point, I mean, I sold labels, but I wasn't really selling labels if, if that makes sense. So, yeah, I came on board and probably what was it? 2017. I want to say there've been with with Brian's since, since then, so about five years and, and just, you know, it's, it's. Kind of a game-changer for the label industry, which is what we're trying to promote and get out there so that people will under. Yeah, I like what you said, labels are labels and that's such a common thing. When I go to quote a label for a customer they are oftentimes surprised by the amount of information we need to know to quote the label. They, they often will be frustrated say, come on, man. Just, just give me the dang label. You know, here's the. Run it. And it's like, well, okay, what's it sticking to? You know what, you know, what are the substrates? What does it need to be UV resistant? Oh, there's so many questions. There's big forms that you have to fill out for labels. Yeah, but what makes you unique is something very different. So tell us about label craft. What, what is so amazing? And thank you again for sending me for those of you on YouTube. You can see this, but if you're listening and I'm holding up a beautiful roll of labels and on the back of the role, it says inviro liner, which is hard to see, but it is it's it's the game changer. So let's talk about that. Sure. Yeah. So, so give you a little background on label craft. So labor craft has been around since 1967, so we've been around for quite some time. So I'm in Toronto, I'm a Lee fan. And I usually tell people we've been around as long as the Leafs of the last time, at least want to stand the cops that's as far as I'm going to go with them, just cause I'm a little bit still disappointed because they just lost a Tampa. But anyway, so anyways, we've been around it's a family run business. The current owner, it was his dad. Always been in the label industry, always producing different types of labels. We support a variety of different industries and different types of labels, but anything adhesive or sticky, if you will, we produce it. Right. What makes and again, I've said labels are labels, which they are, what makes us a little bit different than any other label converter or manufacturer out there today is again, coming back to what you just showed is our liner, the release liners. Our owner, Brian, about, I want to say seven years ago, sort of about five, seven years ago, sort of came up had a customer come up to us and say, Hey, you know, we're trying to go zero to landfill and, and, and in our warehouses, but one of the issues that we have are release liner, right? So release liners, not for people that may or may not know. Recyclable the traditional ways. And what I mean by that is it's, it can't be just picked up by a regular recycler Murph and recycled. It has to be collected kind of bailed together and then sort of shipped. And then they kind of put it through through the process of pulling out the silicone and whatnot. Right? So again, really liners, not recycled because it's got that heavy coating of silicone on it. And I guess for those that are watching, I've got, you know, you can see it's got that heavy coating of silicone. That's what allows that release of the label to come off. Right. So what ends up happening is the majority of people will just have. Putting it to landfill because it's the easiest solution, unfortunately. Right. So Brian sort of came up with a concept and, you know, years and years of R and D and testing has come up with a concept and he wanted to find something that would work for the label industry and make it easy for the end-user. So one we're using a hundred percent recycled paper for our liner, so it's not a hundred percent, it's not Virgin paper. So that's one. Okay. Factor right there, differentiating factor right there. So we're recycle a hundred percent post-consumer recycled paper compared to Virgin paper. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And secondly that liner or the spent liner after you've done with your label, you can, you know, take your label, apply it to your product. You left with the liner, this liner now because it's made a hundred percent recycled paper and we've put it through a process. Where it can actually now be recycled. So it can go with find paper. So you can have your Murph pick that up as photocopy paper. Well, which is very valuable. Yeah. So it's a game changer. And the other, the other piece to it is when Brian developed it, he wanted to make sure that this was simple and there was no new equipment required, no changes to existing systems or processes. So basically you can take that our role. You know, whatever it is, a four by six direct thermal label, drop it right into your printer and print. No one would know the difference. The only difference now is that that liner is recycled. So. Yeah, it's a huge game changer. And again, a lot of people don't realize and don't think about the release liner of, of a label, right? So, you know, usually the, the large corporations out there they're going through tons of labels. So you can think of any e-commerce business today. The amount of shipping labels that they print, what I typically say is 50% of that label. If they don't have a process in place is ending up in their land fill. So with small, small businesses, if they have the capabilities of one storing that amount of release liner, right. Where someone will pick it up to, they may, again, they may not have the space for it, and it also has to be trucked somewhere. So again, there's a lot involved in it. Right. So we're trying to make it easy. That's amazing. Oftentimes on Tik TOK or, or Instagram, you'll see a small or even larger companies posting videos about their labels spitting out because, because every label is an order and they're like, you know, like congratulate us, you know, we're doing great. And I often think of all of that is going into the landfill that, you know, unfortunately, you know, again, I read somewhere that seven to 10% of a release liner gets recycled, meaning it gets picked up and processed and whatnot. Right? Oh, that's good. So seven to 10% of everything that's out there. Oh, I thought you said 70. So only seven to 10% gets picked up. And the reason for that is, is again, it's, it's not feasible for a lot of companies, small, medium, large, whatever it might be to do that. One, like I said, they need the volume before someone will come pick it up, it's got, gotta be shipped somewhere. And three, if you don't have storage to keep that, you know, the easiest thing is to put it right into the waste system. Right. So again, we just, w you know, when we, when Brian came up with this, he was looking for a solution to, to To manage liner waste, but make it simple and easy where everyone would be able to do it. That's excellent. I, the only other solution I've seen other than recycling is I saw some companies reuse that liner material as. Yeah. Which I thought was a creative solution to get at least one more use out of it. To me that's much better than just tossing in the garbage can. So that was cool. Yeah. So, I mean, like one of the statistics I read somewhere and I can't remember where it was, but something like 30,000 trailer loads of release liner each and every year ended up in our land fill. So you think about that 30,000 trailers? That's a fair bit. That's that's across north America. W which is huge. So, you know, hopefully, you know, what we're trying to do is eliminate that, so that, you know, everything can now be recycled and we're closing that that sort of loop, right. We're using a hundred percent post-consumer waste. You use your labels, your print it gets recycled, gets picked up and then gets turned back into paper liner, whatever. That's excellent. It's exciting to see a real solution and a real sustainable alternative and the world of packaging. There's lots of smoke and mirrors out there. And, and this is I think the real deal. So I noticed on your sign there that It says, it says wattage is saved and that's a really big deal with the environmental movement is reducing things like , electricity usage. Can you speak, speak to that? How did you guys manage to do that? Yeah, so, so great question. So one of our partners, so again, one of our partners is, is rolling. So they're a paper company mill out of Roland sustaina out of a. And they're also in the U S they're one of our partners. So we're using their recycled paper for our lights. So typically what we can show our customers is a comparison of what their environmental impact would be by switching to our liner compared to a regular liner. Right? So those numbers that, that are sort of the environmental impact report, it's something that we work with Roland on and their third party to kind of give us those numbers based on. What we're producing and those numbers are based on again recycled paper compared to Virgin paper. And the surgeons have ptosis that goes through to get to that point and what's involved with it. And, and whatnot. Right? So those are where those numbers come from. So the benefit again, you know, one of the things that we can show our customers is, Hey, we can give you sort of what your environmental impact. Compared to what you're currently using with. It's amazing. Yeah. So like a life cycle analysis of before or option a and option B, correct. Can be provided. That's incredible. And I think a lot of companies are striving for those kinds of statistics right now because they're, they're setting. They're saying, Hey, by 2025 or by 2030, we're going to be, we're going to reduce carbon emissions by X, whatever that is, or we're going to reach this, we're going to be a hundred percent recycled material or recyclable material or both. So it sounds like this is a real cog in that machine of moving it forward to you know, a more sustainable future. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, we've got a lot of customers that are currently using it. You know, what I would say is really it's providing them with a solution that they had a problem too, that they didn't know that there was a solution. Right. That's that makes sense. Yeah. Right. Oh yeah. Very true. Very, very, very normal in the packaging world. Yes. Yeah. And, and a lot of people, again, don't think labels what the impact would be. Right. Again, labels are, like I said, everywhere But not a lot of people realize that even though it's a small portion of packaging, it still has a big impact at the end of the day. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. So what other kinds of solutions are you seeing out there with using your, your products? I mean, it's more than just, just labels on shipping boxes. What other uses are for are there for these labels? Yeah. Great question. So obviously we're doing a bunch of different types of labels. We do blank labels, we do full color labels, you know you know, different types of industries, whatever. It might be. One of the other areas that we're all. Exploring and testing and whatnot is any type of liner, right? So you have a, might not have one here, but you have an an envelope and you pull that liner off. So we've, we're experimenting with that. We've got it in the markets and testing it and seeing, see how that goes. I mean, you know, there there's anywhere there's a liner and an adhesive, this product will work just a matter of figuring out how to make it work. Right. But it's the concept is. That's a brilliant opportunity and a huge opportunity. I just I just talked about that at waste expo. Nike's one box or, or physics one box same, same concept on that box. There is a strip of adhesive so that you can send your shoes back, correct. And not need another one. But that would be a perfect application for that. If you don't think about those all going into landfill. Yep. Yeah. So, so again, when Brian sort of developed this product, it was labeled driven, right? I mean, that's everything that we've been doing is labels, labels, labels. So we have a couple of partners that we work with and, and we have product out there. So in terms of the liner for envelopes to know that that's sort of the first step, but again, There's a, there's so much out there in terms of what we can do and help the industry. I mean, it's, we're chipping away at it one at a time. Right. I mean, ultimately I wish we could help everyone out, but you know, we're getting there and, and, and I think it's just the knowledge and education getting that out there so that people understand, because again, you know, my wife didn't realize like when she would pull off a liner or a label or whatever it might be. You know, some people, she didn't know that it's not recycling. Right? So some people will actually put that into recycling. Some people will put it into the waste and you know, we're trying to avoid that when trying to educate and, and again, labels are sort of what I would consider. I consider it's at the top, but for most people it's at the bottom. Right. They don't, they don't. Yeah, I think even industry experts will oftentimes make that error. So that's, that's very common. I, I bet. Yeah. Well, are you finding that a extended producer responsibility is affecting your So we haven't, I haven't seen a lot of that to be honest with you. I mean, right now, I think, and I, so what I learned from you from one of your podcasts is the scope three scope, one scope two, and scope three that that's coming out. Right. So. Oh really after I heard that podcast. And then I started hearing people, ask them questions about it. It was kind of odd how it worked out, but it worked out. But I think that a lot of people don't understand that and there's still a lot of education around it. Like I'm still learning. I mean, I don't know everything about it and I've been asking questions just to understand it more. But I think that's something that's coming down the pipeline and, and people are. Start to wonder what do they need to do, right? Yeah. How do they, you know, do what the right thing to do is, and what do they need to do, right. And where can they, where can they achieve these numbers? Right. So let's talk about scope three because I think you're exactly right. I think there's going to be a French. Push. I don't know when exactly, probably six months before the law takes shape or, or effect, but there is going to be thousands of companies out there that say all of a sudden what we have to do, what, and, and how and what scope three. And so do you want to kind of explain what it is or. Are you comfortable with that? I'm not an expert in it. I mean, you probably know more than I do right. In terms of what it is, but really it's, it's the STC that's come out and you can correct me if I'm wrong. It's come out and said, you know, if you're going to show these numbers you need to show these numbers. You need to be held accountable for them. Right. So scope three from my understanding is, you know, Myself as a manufacturer of labels for a particular company, I would be responsible for showing those numbers that XYZ can say, Hey, these are the numbers coming from my label manufacturer or whatever that might be. That's a great explanation. Essentially what they're saying is, okay, you got, you have targets. You've made claims. Back I'm up, buddy. Let's show the world what you're actually doing and not just you, but your suppliers. So you you're all the way through the system. Everything you're buying that goes into your product. You need to show us how that is attaining your goals in the sustainability front. And to me, a label is such a great way. To improve because so few are, are recyclable. Yep. So this will be a real, a real easy win for a lot of people. It's a, it's a simple fix, but again, it's, people need to understand that it's it's out there. Right? We're we're not a large company, but we're big enough that we were able to figure this out. And no one else can do it. Right. Like I said, we've got a us and Canadian. And, and, and all our customers that are currently using are, are happy. Right. And you know, you go through that whole process of testing and whatnot, and just to see if it will work and it works. And, you know, people, people are skeptical at first until they actually see it. And, and really our labels, like I said, are no different the face doc, the label itself is no different than anyone. Else's. The only difference is now that liner is the big difference. Right? That's what's gonna, that's what's gonna. As a company, if you can go out to your customers and say, Hey, we're, we're being more sustainable. And here's what we're doing outside of our packaging. We're also doing our labels. We're also doing this and this cause a lot of consumers or, or end users don't realize what the waste that's created at the, you know, at that point of applying that label. Right. That's incredible. 30,000 truckloads of waste. Yeah. I read that somewhere. So something like 30,000 loads each and every year. And. Incredible. Just with label lines. Material and insane that to me, it's like these numbers are boggle your mind. You know, I heard somebody say the other day, Amazon ships 4,000 packages every minute of every day. And Amazon's a good example. You look at what, they're, what they're shipping. They're throwing a four by six label, but they're throwing a four by six label on every single. And, and, you know, sometimes they have another yellow label that goes on it. So there's a fair bit of labeling that goes on in, in that. Right. So that's 500 labels in one role. Yep. Imagine eight of these, every minute of every day. Just getting tossed into the landfill. So you give me a good example for, I guess everyone that's on YouTube here. Yup. That's a role of 1,000 four by six labels. Just the liner. This is a standard liner. This is our recycled liner. So this will end up going into recycling. This ends up going into wasted. It doesn't look like a lot because it's all wound up. Yeah. But it's a fair bit. Right. And that'll end up all scrunched up in a, in a bin. Right. And take up a lot more room, man. This is great. Well, I'm really excited to tell the world about this and to share your products with everyone. You know, and no Landsberg, Orora is going to be one of your international and national distributors of these labels, which is exciting because we are working hard to be one of the most sustainable packaging companies in the world. And I think we're, we're making real progress. Yeah, you guys have been great to work with and, and, and again, you know, you always get the companies out there that say, Hey, we want to be sustainable. And then if you put something in front of them, like, oh, well, we'll look at it next year. Right. I mean, if, if there's something out there, you know, and you say you're sustainable, let's, let's look at it. Right. So, but you guys have been great. I've been working with your team, so I'm excited about the. Yeah. Thank you, sir. Well, and on that note, thank you for, for your time today. Can you tell the audience how to get ahold of you? Sure. Yeah. You can visit our website. So www dot label, craft.com. LinkedIn. I'm on, I'm on LinkedIn. So Brandon Gomes and you just look me up or label craft. We're on there as well. Cool and email address brandon@labelcraft.ca. That's the only difference and on tick tock, tick talk to that's, right? I'm following your steps, trying to get more into it. So I'm starting to get more into it. We're we're gonna make, we're going to make tick talk the premiere. Location for all packaging sustainable packaging research. So, yep. There you go. So check out at corrugated and at, at label craft on on Tik TOK. So, and thank you, Landsberg Orora for sponsoring this podcast. If you're listening, give us a review. We appreciate it and make sure you're subscribed. So you don't miss the next episode. Thanks again, Brandon. Really appreciate this. Thank you.