Carlsberg Green Fiber Bottle Brings New Era of Sustainable Packaging

In recent years, consumers are increasingly more concerned about their environmental impact on the planet. In response, brands are also looking for alternative packaging solutions to minimize their environmental footprint. Keeping up with the sustainability trend, even the world-renowned beer maker Carlsberg Group invented a new sustainable packaging – Green Fiber Bottle.

Green Fiber Bottle is a 100 percent natural and recyclable beer packaging. The recycled paper beer bottle consists of wood fibers collected from responsibly managed forests. It includes an internal coating, which helps in keeping the brew filled in the paper bottles.

The beer maker revealed two research prototypes of the world’s first paper bottle for beer. One of the prototypes includes a thin layer of recycled PET polymer film barrier. The other prototype uses a 100 percent natural PEF polymer film barrier.

Both prototypes are undergoing trials for testing to monitor their barrier properties for individual materials. These trials are to check whether the recyclable material protects the drink or not. Carlsberg is aiming to form a bottle with 100 percent organic materials (bio-based), without using any type of non-biodegradable synthetic polymers.

The two Green Fiber Bottle prototypes are part of the beer market’s search for eco-friendly packaging and its sustainability program. Furthermore, the company wants to reduce carbon emissions to “Zero” from its breweries while decreasing the carbon footprint by 30 percent by 2030.

Carlsberg started with the Green Fiber Bottle packaging in 2015 along with other packaging companies BillerudKorsnäs and EcoXpac, as well as some researchers from the Danish University of Technology.

Now they are working on Generation 2.0 of the Green Fibre Bottle that’s claimed to perform better than single-use glass bottles. As per the product’s lifecycle assessment, Carlsberg even has higher ambitions for creating Generation 3.0 design as well. With this, the company aims to attain up to 80 percent fewer carbon emissions compared to existing single-use glass bottles. It means for each single-use glass bottle formed, five fiber bottles can be created for the same carbon footprint.

Simon Boas Hoffmeyer, Group Sustainability Director at Carlsberg, said;

The progress made with our new Fibre Bottle is a testament to Carlsberg’s pioneering spirit, with a focus on making better products in every sense of the word. We’ve been working hard on this project since 2015, and aim to continue to set the industry standard by further improving the bottle’s environmental footprint and product performance. Collaboration is key and, together with our partners, we’re excited to see how research and development into sustainable packaging solutions are now becoming the norm.

The trial starts its global launch of the company’s ESG program, Together Towards Zero, and Beyond, which will stand for better sustainability performance. This will further take on the new ambitions inside sustainable agriculture and packaging.

With the vision of advancing its sustainable packaging, Carlsberg wants to offer high-quality products. Meanwhile, they aim to eliminate their environmental impact or reduce it to almost negligible levels.