In Closing: PLA, You’ve Never Looked So Good
Mineralogie brings one of the first colored PLA compacts to market.
by Jennifer Kwok, EditorAs Mary Van, owner of Mineralogie, tells it, she didn’t just want biodegradable packaging for her mineral makeup line; she wanted attractive biodegradable packaging. Thus, when she decided to switch a lot of her products into biodegradable compacts, she called Michael Salemi, COO of The Packaging Company (TPC; Long Beach, CA), to create a custom solution from scratch.
The compacts that TPC created are slim and elegant, fitting for the beauty industry, and made from polylactic acid (PLA). Unlike many of the milky-colored PLA beauty packages on the market, however, Mineralogie’s compacts are colored an eye-catching copper shade. As Van and Salemi explain, achieving this color on the PLA was a year-long, hard-won process.
Part of the problem, Salemi says, is that TPC itself had to develop the process of giving the PLA its color, without any assistance from any PLA providers. “The people who made the resin didn’t want to tell us what their formulations or ingredients were,” he says. So, through trial and error, TPC’s molders had to engineer a brand-new process for adding color.
One particular challenge during molding was that the PLA resin melted at a lower temperature than virgin resins. “It’s biodegradable, so it has to have a lower threshold for melting or deforming so that it can biodegrade,” Salemi points out.
“When we got the compact off of the first run, I was a little disappointed because it looked a little rugged,” says Van. “I told Michael, ‘I know that this is for the environment, but we still have to have a pretty package. It can have a few nicks in it, and it can look like burlap compared with silk, but it’s still got to look better.’”
Mineralogie and TPC went through numerous revisions before arriving at a result they were both happy with.
“There are a lot of people who have been working with PLA, and they’ve not gotten it right,” says Van. In fact, she says, before partnering with TPC, she had explored some other stock PLA options offered by suppliers. “One company kept saying that it was going to send us samples, but it never did,” she says. “Looking back at what Michael went through creating our compacts, I think that that supplier was probably having the same kinds of challenges that Michael was having.”
She adds, “Michael was determined to do it and finally got it worked out so that we do have a nice container. It’s still not beautiful, but it’s very, very nice. It’s a very good starting point.”
“There are a couple of PLA packages on the market already, but as you can see, the next stage that we’re trying to take these packages to is quite a leaping step,” says Salemi.