United Caps unveils industry-first ‘Define Your Circle’ initiative

UNITED CAPS, an international manufacturer of caps and closures, has unveiled a new initiative, ‘Define Your Circle.’ As part of the company’s ongoing commitment to sustainability, ‘Define Your Circle’ is designed to provide UNITED CAPS customers and their customers a simpler way to calculate full life-cycle environmental impact of their products, from before the materials enter the plant right through to its performance in the hands of the end user. In addition, ‘Define Your Circle’ offers a means to customers of contributing to the development of a truly circular economy, in which plastics are too valuable to waste, and are wasted when they are considered single-use.

“At UNITED CAPS, sustainability has always been at the core of our values,” said Benoit Henckes, CEO. “We are constantly looking for actions we can take to reduce the environmental impact of our caps and closures – how they are made, the materials they are constructed from, their weight, how they are sold and how they are distributed. With our industry-first ‘Define Your Circle’ initiative, we have extended that ability to our customers, providing easy-to-use tools that allow us to help them calculate their carbon footprint more accurately, taking actions where appropriate to reduce their life cycle environmental impact and make data-driven informed decisions about their products. We consider this to be a responsible approach to doing business in this era of climate change and negative human impact on the environment.”

“Our goal with ‘Define Your Circle’ is to give our customers a tool to make informed choices in consideration of their environmental impact and to compare our products with each other and with competitive products to reach the most sustainable solution possible,” Henckes explained.

Instead of depending on the complexities of a full LCA assessment, UNITED CAPS has chosen to leverage one of the industry’s largest life cycle assessment databases, GaBi, which is constantly updated as new technology and new insights come to the fore. GaBi stems from the German words “Ganzheitliche Bilanzierung” for holistic balancing and has been around for a quarter of a century with the goal of easing the process of life cycle assessments.

The UNITED CAPS ‘Define Your Circle’ tool gives customers access to this extensive database, delivering insight and guidance that leads to better sustainability decision making. As part of this holistic approach, ‘Define Your Circle’ allows customers to analyse the environmental footprint of caps, closures, and the containers they are used with, making better decisions about many aspects of product manufacture and distribution.

Suitable for food applications, this certification allows brands to communicate the partial use of certified resin (less than 100%). So, for example, a closure may have been produced with ISCC Certified Resin but the bottle was not. In this example, the closure certification can be displayed on the packaging, aiding the consumer in making an informed choice. “We often talk in terms of caps and closures that have to perform in the plant and in the hand; it is our hope that ’Define Your Circle’ will also encourage people to talk about performing for the planet as well,” concluded Henckes.