Clyrell resin clear favorite for Unilever ice cream
A unique combination of stiffness, impact resistance, clarity and flowability made Clyrell PP resin the natural choice for packaging Unilever’s Carte d’Or ice cream brand.
Unilever’s Carte d’Or ice cream brand is packaged in one-litre thin wall injection moulded containers. Clarity is a key characteristic in this packaging, since visibility of the product within the container has proved to be an important selling point with consumers.
When changes to the manufacturing process made greater stiffness necessary in the container bodies, Unilever approached LyondellBasell with a demanding specification: a high-clarity resin with sufficient flowability for the thin-wall injection moulding process, coupled with increased stiffness and good impact resistance at low temperatures.
“One of the new resins from our Clyrell resins range met the requirements almost exactly,” said Nathalie Cartiaux, LyondellBasell’s Technical Service Manager for injection moulding. ”Normally there’s a trade-off between processability and impact strength, but this resin achieves exceptional flowability of 25g/10min while maintaining good impact resistance.”
“In addition it has a stiffness of 1200 MPa compared with the 850 MPa of the previous grade we supplied for these applications. This combination of characteristics was exactly what Unilever needed to optimise their manufacturing processes.”
The improved mechanical properties of Clyrell EC340R resin also offer significant potential for downgauging – up to 10% less material can be used to achieve the same packaging performance. This has implications for reducing manufacturer’s liability for packaging recovery: “In the long run, this thin wall injection moulding resin will help customers reduce their contribution to waste recovery systems such as “Green Point” in