When Great Packaging Has Nowhere to Go. The Multi-Laminate Soft Plastic Disaster.

The Problem With the Pouch: Designing Packaging for What Happens Next

Why businesses are choosing Salty 
home-compostable kraft pouches

The stand-up pouch is everywhere.

Coffee, supplements, pet food, snacks, powders, health products and countless other products rely on flexible pouches because they're lightweight, efficient to transport and provide excellent product protection.

But there is a problem.

Many conventional pouches are made by laminating multiple layers of petrochemical-based plastic together to achieve the barrier, strength, printability and sealing performance a product requires.

Those layers can perform exceptionally well as packaging.

The problem is what happens next.

When Great Packaging Has Nowhere to Go.

Traditional multi-laminate pouches can combine several different polymer layers and other materials into one structure.

Once bonded together, those materials can be difficult to separate and recover through conventional household recycling systems.

So while the pouch may use relatively little material, its useful life can be extremely short — manufactured from resources that took millions of years to form, used for weeks or months, and potentially disposed of after a single use.

For us, that's a design problem.

Packaging shouldn't be considered successful only because it protects a product on the shelf.

We need to design for what happens after the product is gone.

A Different Approach: Salty Kraft

Salty Kraft pouches were developed to provide businesses with an alternative pathway.

Our kraft pouches use certified AS5810 home-compostable film, providing the functionality required from flexible packaging while creating an organic recycling pathway at the end of their useful life.

They are designed to be:

  • Reusable

  • Made using certified AS5810 home-compostable film

  • Food safe

  • Heat sealable

  • Suitable for a wide range of dry food and product applications

  • Designed for home composting at end of life

And importantly, we encourage people to reuse the pouch before composting it.

Reuse First. Then Organically Recycle.

Compostable packaging shouldn't automatically mean single use.

If the pouch remains clean and functional, use it again.

That could mean refilling it, storing another product or finding another practical use around the home. Extending the useful life of packaging means getting more value from the materials and resources already used to manufacture it.

Then, when the pouch reaches the end of its useful life, its certified home-compostable components provide another pathway: organic recycling at home.

Rather than relying solely on centralised collection and recycling infrastructure, home compostability can enable households and communities with appropriate composting systems to participate directly in the end-of-life process.

Under suitable home-composting conditions, certified compostable materials are designed to be broken down through biological processes and returned to the organic cycle.

Why Businesses Are Making the Change

Packaging decisions are changing.

Businesses are increasingly looking beyond what a package costs and how it looks. They are asking harder questions about where materials come from, how packaging can be reused, what happens after disposal and whether the claimed end-of-life pathway actually exists for their customers.

Legislation and Extended Producer Responsibility are also putting increasing pressure on businesses to understand the packaging they place on the market and reduce problematic and unnecessary materials.

That's why we're seeing businesses looking for alternatives to conventional multilaminate flexible packaging.

Not simply because they want a pouch that looks more sustainable.
They want packaging designed differently from the beginning.

Packaging Shouldn't Become Someone Else's Problem

At Salty, our approach is simple:

Use less. Reuse where possible. Choose renewable materials. And design packaging with its end of life in mind.

Our kraft pouches provide businesses with another option — combining the practicality of flexible packaging with reuse and certified home compostable materials, allowing participating households and communities to take greater responsibility for what happens to packaging after its job is done.

Because the future of packaging isn't just about what we make packaging from.

It's about where it goes next. Own your impact. 

To explore our Kraft Home Compostable Stand Up Pouch visit www.wearesalty.nz