Replacing a difficult-to-recycle flexible laminate is relatively easy when the package does not have to do very much.

Drinkable yogurt is different.

The package has to contain a liquid product reliably. It needs sufficient oxygen and moisture protection. The seal around the spout has to survive distribution and repeated consumer handling. The film has to tolerate the hygiene treatment used before cold filling. And all of this has to happen at production speeds that make commercial sense.

That is why SÜDPACK’s latest expansion of its CarbonLite PurePP platform into drinkable yogurt deserves more attention than another mono-material packaging announcement.

The German film producer has developed a polypropylene-based structure for cold-filled yogurt drinks, drinkable skyr and related dairy products, positioning it as an alternative to conventional PET/aluminum/PE laminates.

The important question is not simply whether the pouch is “recyclable.”

It is whether design for recycling can survive contact with one of flexible packaging’s more demanding performance applications.

SÜDPACK says its answer is yes.

The industry will now have to determine how much of that performance can be repeated at commercial scale, across different products, filling systems and European recycling markets.

Dairy exposes the weakness of the simple mono-material argument

Flexible packaging has spent decades becoming more sophisticated by combining materials.

PET can contribute mechanical and printing properties.

Polyethylene or polypropylene layers can provide sealing functions.

Aluminum foil can provide a very strong barrier.

Adhesives connect those layers into a package capable of surviving filling, distribution and storage.

The difficulty emerges after use.

A laminate that performs extremely well as packaging may be poorly suited to conventional mechanical recycling because its components cannot easily be separated into clean material streams.

The industry’s answer has increasingly been to redesign structures around one predominant polymer family.

But that creates a different engineering problem.

Removing material complexity cannot mean removing packaging performance.

For dairy producers, a structure that scores well in a recyclability assessment but introduces leaks, shortens shelf life or slows a filling line is not an improvement.

That is what makes SÜDPACK’s drinkable-yogurt application significant.

The company is attempting to move mono-PP design beyond relatively straightforward dry-food applications and into a package where barrier properties, hygiene, sealing and production stability all matter simultaneously.

The difficult part may be the spout, not just the film

Much of the discussion around recyclable flexible packaging focuses on the body of the pouch.

For a spouted pouch, that is only part of the package.

The closure system also has to fit the recycling strategy.

SÜDPACK’s concept combines its PP-based film with a polypropylene spout, allowing the principal components to remain within the same polymer family. The company says matched sealing layers and spout design provide the leak-tightness required for the format.

That detail matters.

Current RecyClass guidance for PP flexible packaging identifies PP closures and PP components as fully compatible with the PP recycling stream. By contrast, closures or attached components made from materials such as PET, PVC, PS or PLA can create incompatibilities. RecyClass also places restrictions on barrier materials, adhesives, inks and other components because recyclability depends on the complete package, not merely the polymer named on the front of a technical datasheet.

This is an important shift in how flexible packaging should be evaluated.

A pouch cannot really be considered “mono-material” in a meaningful recycling sense simply because most of its film is polypropylene.

The barrier.

The adhesive.

The ink.

The spout.

The seal.

And other attached components all matter.

For converters and brands, the challenge is therefore becoming one of system design rather than film substitution.

Cold filling introduces another hurdle

SÜDPACK says the new structure was developed specifically for cold filling and can tolerate packaging treatments involving UVC or hydrogen peroxide to reduce microbial load.

That point is easy to overlook.

Moving from one laminate to another is not simply a purchasing decision for the film buyer.

The material still has to function inside the customer’s existing packaging process.

SÜDPACK says the PurePP structure offers a sufficiently broad processing window to run on standard equipment at high cycle rates while maintaining reliable spout sealing.

If borne out across commercial installations, that may prove more important to adoption than the recyclability claim itself.

Converters and food manufacturers rarely evaluate sustainability changes independently from output.

A material that requires substantially slower line speeds, narrower sealing tolerances or frequent production intervention can introduce cost elsewhere in the operation.

That is why “machine compatibility” should not be treated as a secondary specification in the transition toward recyclable flexible packaging.

The package has to be recyclable without becoming harder to manufacture.

Barrier reduction has a limit: the food still has to survive

Another important part of SÜDPACK’s claim concerns barrier performance.

The company says the structure can be adapted to provide the required oxygen and water-vapor barriers and that its internal testing showed shelf life comparable with the PET/aluminum/PE laminates used for these applications.

The phrase internal testing is important.

SÜDPACK has not disclosed enough detail in the announcement to independently evaluate the shelf-life comparison, including the exact yogurt formulation, storage conditions, filling parameters or barrier specification used.

That does not invalidate the result.

It does mean the claim should remain attributed to the supplier rather than presented as an independently established equivalence across the dairy category.

Drinkable yogurt is not one standardized product.

Protein level, acidity, formulation, storage period and distribution requirements can differ between products.

The appropriate barrier specification therefore has to be matched to the actual application.

That is a more credible way to view mono-material development.

The objective should not necessarily be to eliminate every barrier component.

It is to use the minimum structure capable of delivering the required product protection while remaining compatible with the targeted recycling process.

RecyClass’s 2026 guidance illustrates that balance. Certain barrier technologies can remain compatible with PP film recycling, while others are restricted or considered incompatible depending on material and concentration.

In other words, recyclable flexible packaging does not mean barrier-free packaging.

It means designing the barrier around the recycling system instead of treating end-of-life as an afterthought.

The “more than 95% recyclable” number requires context

SÜDPACK says the drinkable-yogurt concept achieves a recyclability rate above 95%.

That number is especially interesting because the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, or PPWR, establishes 95% and above as the future threshold for recyclability performance Grade A.

But the two should not yet be treated as equivalent.

Under PPWR, detailed EU design-for-recycling criteria for individual packaging categories are still to be established through delegated acts. The Commission is due to establish those criteria by January 1, 2028.

From 2030, packaging will be assessed against design-for-recycling performance grades, with Grade A at 95% or above, Grade B at 80% or above and Grade C at 70% or above. From 2035, assessment will also take account of whether packaging is actually recycled at scale.

That distinction matters in September 2026.

SÜDPACK can design toward the direction of PPWR.

It cannot yet claim an official future EU Grade A classification under final criteria that have not been adopted.

The company’s own September 8 announcement is appropriately cautious on another point: its more-than-95% recyclability estimate was calculated using CHIRA software and has not been validated or certified by an external institute, and SÜDPACK notes that recyclability can vary by country and recycling system.

There is an additional point worth clarifying.

Elsewhere on SÜDPACK’s CarbonLite spouted-pouch website, the company states that a complete CarbonLite Spouted Pouch PurePP concept comprising film and spout achieved 96% recyclability certified by cyclos-HTP.

The public information does not make sufficiently clear whether that certification applies to precisely the same drinkable-yogurt structure described in the September release.

Until that is confirmed, those two assessment statements should not be combined into one claim.

That is a small distinction editorially, but an increasingly important one commercially.

As PPWR implementation advances, packaging suppliers will need to be precise about whether a recyclability percentage is:

an internal calculation,

a laboratory assessment,

an external certification,

a design-for-recycling score,

or evidence that a package is actually being collected, sorted and recycled at scale.

Those are not interchangeable concepts.

Designed for recycling is only the first half of the problem

This may become the most important issue surrounding mono-PP flexible packaging over the next decade.

A package can be technically compatible with recycling and still fail to become circular if it is not collected, correctly sorted and delivered to an appropriate recycler.

The PPWR itself recognizes that difference.

From 2035, recyclability assessment is intended to include a recycled-at-scale requirement rather than relying solely on package design.

Europe does have commercial mechanical recycling capacity for flexible polyolefin packaging. CEFLEX describes PE and PP flexible-packaging recycling as commercially proven in Europe, while also warning that substantially more infrastructure will be needed as collection expands and legislative requirements tighten.

That creates an important distinction for brand owners considering a PP pouch today:

Can this package enter a PP recycling process?

and

Will this package actually reach that process in the market where I sell it?

are two different questions.

SÜDPACK itself acknowledges that recyclability can vary according to country and recycling system.

That caveat should not be buried in a footnote.

It is central to the future of flexible-packaging circularity.

The carbon claim also needs the correct boundary

SÜDPACK reports another substantial advantage for the new structure.

According to its internal calculation, a 111 μm PP-based pouch film has a CO2e footprint per square meter more than 40% below a 103 μm PET/aluminum/PE laminate when comparing raw materials and production.

That is potentially meaningful.

But it should not be converted into a broader claim that the new pouch has “40% less climate impact” than all existing drinkable-yogurt packaging.

The comparison is between two film structures and is expressed per square meter.

It is not, based on the information released, a comparison with a PET bottle.

Nor is the figure presented in this announcement as a complete cradle-to-grave lifecycle assessment covering filling, transport, refrigeration, food waste, collection and actual end-of-life treatment.

Those boundaries matter.

Flexible packaging often benefits from low material weight, but the environmental performance of a food package ultimately depends on more than grams of packaging.

If a packaging change were to increase product loss or shorten shelf life, the overall environmental equation could change.

There is no evidence here that SÜDPACK’s pouch does that; the company says its testing indicates equivalent shelf life.

The point is that packaging carbon claims should be evaluated alongside product protection, not separately from it.

This is where the mono-material transition gets serious

For years, flexible packaging’s sustainability discussion was dominated by a relatively simple idea:

replace difficult multilayer structures with mono-material alternatives.

The next stage is harder.

Those structures now have to enter applications where conventional laminates were selected precisely because they solved difficult technical problems.

Drinkable yogurt is one of those tests.

SÜDPACK’s approach brings together several elements that increasingly define the next generation of flexible packaging:

a predominantly PP structure,

a PP closure system,

application-specific barrier engineering,

compatibility with hygiene treatment,

industrial sealing performance,

high-speed machinability,

and a recycling route designed around one polymer family.

None of those characteristics alone proves that the format will displace bottles or conventional laminates at scale.

Nor does a recyclability score prove that every used pouch will be recycled.

But the development does show where competition in flexible packaging is moving.

The question is no longer simply:

Can we make a mono-material pouch?

The harder question is:

Can we make one that behaves like the complex laminate it is supposed to replace—and can the waste system actually recover it afterward?

If the answer to both questions becomes yes, recyclable mono-material packaging will no longer be confined to the easiest applications.

It will begin competing in the applications where multilayer packaging has historically been hardest to replace.

For dairy brands, converters and film producers, that is the part of SÜDPACK’s announcement worth watching.

Last Updated on 14/09/2026 by Jota Machinery