Fibrestrap replace for plastic zip ties

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https://www.fibrestrap.com/

A more sustainable cable tie! Check out this great episode with Co-Founder Sigrid Svedberg 

Summary

In this episode of Sustainable Packaging, host Cory Connors interviews Sigrid Svedberg, co-founder of EVLR, about their innovative product, Fiber Strap. Sigrid shares her background in engineering and how she transitioned into the packaging industry. The conversation delves into the environmental benefits of Fiber Strap, its material composition, and its applications across various industries, including bikes and toys. Sigrid discusses the company's growth, market interest, and the impact of sustainability regulations on their business. The episode concludes with insights into future innovations and how to contact the EVLR team.


Takeaways

Sigrid Svedberg has a background in engineering and design.
Fiber Strap is made from Nordic tree fibers and PLA.
The product is designed to replace plastic zip ties in packaging.
Fiber Strap is biodegradable and dissolves in water.
It maintains 70% of its strength after one year in outdoor conditions.
The product is gaining traction in the bike and gardening tool industries.
Sigrid emphasizes the importance of sustainability in packaging.
The company is in a scale-up phase and has developed its first production machine.
Regulations like the plastic tax are influencing market demand for alternatives.
Future applications include horticulture and marine industries.


Titles

Revolutionizing Packaging with Fiber Strap
Sigrid Svedberg on Sustainable Innovations


Sound bites

"This is just pure paper, the cord."
"We work a lot with bikes."
"We have developed our first machine."


Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Sustainable Packaging and EVLR
01:06 Sigrid Svedberg's Background and Entry into Packaging
02:04 The Innovation of Fiber Strap
03:47 Material Composition and Strength of Fiber Strap
05:52 Environmental Impact and Biodegradability
07:57 Applications in Various Industries
09:57 Future Innovations and Scaling Up Fiber Strap
11:38 Company Growth and Market Interest
13:47 Sustainability Regulations and Competitions
15:43 Exploring New Markets and Applications
17:40 Conclusion and Contact Information

Keywords

sustainable packaging, fiber strap, EVLR, biodegradable materials, packaging innovation, environmental

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I'm here to help you make your packaging more sustainable! Reach out today and I'll get back to you asap.

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Transcript

0:59

Welcome to the Sustainable Packaging Podcast with Cory Connors presented by Atlantic Packaging. I'm your host Cory Connors and today I'm excited to welcome Sigrid Svedberg, the co-founder of EVLR and FiberStrap. This packaging alternative is made to endure, but not to last. Welcome to Sustainable Packaging with Cory Connors. Today's guest is Sigrid Svedberg, the co-founder of EVLR. How are you Sigrid? Hi Cory. Thank you so much for reminding me. I'm good. That's great to have you on. Where are you located there? I am actually Swedish and our company is Swedish but I am located in Valencia in Spain. So I work remotely from home. Nice. So you live there in Spain full time? Yes, I do. We have lived there for about three years now. Right. Quite a change from Sweden, oh Sweden so the climate is a bit different, definitely. I've a, yeah. Well, great to have you on today. We're a big fan of your, your product called fiber strap, which here I've got an example of one. We'll talk about it today. Um, and hopefully you can explain it to us, but before we get to all of that, can you tell us a little bit about your background? How'd you get into the packaging industry of all things? Yes, so my background is within engineering. I studied design engineering at the university. So it's not really related to packaging, but by coincidence I happened to get into the world of packaging and I've been ever since. And I think that is the situation for a lot of people. You get into the packaging... industry and it's so interesting and it's so complex and it's so many things that you can develop and work on so you stay there because it's so fun. I agree. Totally agree. It's one of those industries you just, people don't leave generally. Yeah. Well said. Well, let's talk about fiber strap. What is it? How did you come up with this idea? I'm holding one here. I'm showing the, you're watching the video, you can see it. It's very small. This is what is it? How'd you come up with it? So we are three co-founders of EVLR and we all have been in the fiber industry for about 20 years each. So we have seen a lot of plastics in packaging and we have seen a lot of plastic zip ties. We thought it is not reasonable to manufacture something in a material that lasts for hundreds of years and use it only once. And it also makes it really difficult to recycle the packaging solution for the end user. So that's the background of Fiverrstrap. That's really fascinating. So what is it made out of? Is it made out of tree fibers, wood fibers, something else all together? Yes, I have bunch of them here. So... Yeah, it is. It's made... And the secret is in the Nordic fibers. We're using fibers from Swedish and Finnish forests. And that means that the fibers are very long, so they have a lot of strength. So this is just pure paper, the cord. Then we have the locking head. It is a PLA. biocomposite. made from sugar cane and it's no food conflict for the sugar cane and it's reinforced with hemp fibers. Then in center of the locking head we have a small tiny tiny metal piece and this is needed, this is our first product, so we need this to secure the locking and it's really easy to just I touch it like this and you can see the strength. So it's a tensile strength of 110 Newton. That is about... yeah. Let's see if I can translate it. 24.7 pounds. Okay. Wow. Very strong. Yeah. And then I noticed there's a hole in the top. Is that sort of a purpose as well? This, this tiny hole in the top. Yes, it's for the manufacturing. em So this, I can't, this is amazing. It's almost all paper. This is really an impressive product. So how long do they last once they're put on? If they are kept dry, think, I mean, it's paper, you know, it can probably last for many years if it's not too much weight and it's kept dry. So we have tested this for outdoor climate as well. For Scandinavian climate with wind, sun and rain. And it's UV with this UV lightning to see how long it can hold. And after one year, then it keeps 70 percent of it. of its strength. That's impressive, 70%. And like you said, doesn't need to perform better than that. It serves a purpose for a short time generally. And like you said, most of these plastic straps aren't, they don't need to be for hundreds of years, right? This is, yeah. the thing also that they are so tiny, the plastic zip ties, they end up in the nature, in the oceans. Animals get trapped into them if they're not opened. And when the animal is growing, the plastic strap, it remains because it doesn't play the grade. Right. And this will eventually compost or biodegrade, right? in water it will dissolve. yeah, yes. oh See, that's very important to mention that it's dissolvable. That's excellent. Wow. So go ahead. Yes, and I just wanted to mention also that in contact with soil, the microorganisms and bacteria, they will start to eat the fibers, just as you read paper, if it would end up in nature. That's really wonderful. So give us some examples of some situations where this fiber strap has replaced the plastic zip ties. We see a lot of our customers, work in the packaging area. We work a lot with bikes. The bike industry, they have worked really, really well with the packaging. Usually the plastic zip tie is the only piece of plastic left that they need for securing the bikes for transport. So otherwise, they have a really nice solution. But when we drive a strap, they can make it fully a recycling pod. Another area is tools, like gardening tools or any other hand tool. And this is also very easy for the end user to recycle the packaging after they have bought the product. think it's really innovative and I've never seen anything like it before and I'm excited to be able to provide it to our customers at Atlantic Packaging and a New Earth project. So this is really something that we're excited to work with our customers on because like you said, oftentimes the zip tie is the last thing in a pack that hasn't been replaced by something not plastic. Yeah, Wilson. Are you seeing a market in the toy industry and other kinds of retail products? feel like that when I open uh toys for my kids, there's lots of plastic straps in there. Yes, I think this is a really interesting industry. I did actually um an analysis quite recently. I bought the toy packaging because I just wanted to know how much plastic does it contain? And just to attach a product, I could count, I don't know, I had a handful of different type of plastic ties. It could be zip ties and other thin plastic ties for one product. I can also imagine attaching this product must be quite difficult with all these types of different materials. So I think it could definitely be an advantage for the toy packaging companies to replace the plastic. And that's a really good point too, that uh it's a lot less work for some people, a lot less labor. Some of those straps can be very difficult to adhere. Yes, and also if replacing with fiber strap, the cord is so flexible so you can do this type of operations. So you can replace two or three plastic zip ties with one longer fiber strap for example. And another advantage is that plastic zip ties, when you cut them, they get really, really sharp. So there's a risk of injuring both operations staff and other people. by working with a plastic sift-izer. Boy, another great point. There are so many injuries caused by packaging that people don't realize that uh especially opening. They talk about that on Christmas morning here in in U S we've talked about that, you know, people getting injured, opening toys or, uh, clam shells or zip ties. These things can cause serious damage to your skin. That's Excellent. I feel like this could potentially get scaled up to a larger size to maybe go around a whole corrugated box or something like that. Is that something you're working on as well? Yes, have different ideas in our innovation pipeline. So today we can produce from 200 millimeters to 780 millimeters. That would be from 8 inches to 30 inches approximately. But of course we have a lot of companies that are asking us if we can make it longer just to replace, as you said, this type of plastic scrap used around. packaging. I think that we need to do some changes maybe on the product because we have a quite big locking head but basically it could work also. But yes, we need to make it longer. Yes. That seems like it's something that could scale up pretty easily. You could just make the head a little larger, make the rope here a larger scale and let longer and you could wrap pallets with these things eventually. That's a great idea. That's excellent. What else do you want to talk about? Anything else you want to tell us about the fiber strap or your company or? So I think we are still, I can talk about our company where we are right now. That can be quite interesting. So we are still a startup, I would say, but in a scale-up phase somewhere there between. So we have developed our first machine. It has been moved recently from its development site to the production site. exciting. Yes, so ramping up now during this year and we see a lot of interest also right now from companies that are very focused on sustainability, sustainable packaging and they are really seeing an advantage of replacing the plastic zip ties with fiber strap. Yeah, that's great point. That's a lot of inquiries that we get is for the replacement of plastic packaging materials because of EPR. Are you finding extended producer responsibility and things like PPWR in Europe helping you sell? Yes, so there are regulations that we hear about also all the time, the plastic tax for example, and also the single use, the ban of single use plastic items. It doesn't include cable ties as it is now, but it feels like this could be this type of product that could be included in this regulation. And we know also that this ban was based on products that they found on beaches in marine environment. But it was a banned product that they knew they could replace with something else. So I think we were a bit early to be included in this. Right. Yeah, they didn't know about you yet. That's interesting. Yeah, they needed to, so we need to explain it to them, to the different governments about this product as an option. Exactly. Have you started entering this into different contests for sustainable packaging, like a sustainable packaging summit in Europe? So we entered some competitions and we have won those competitions, most of them that we entered. Thank you. We have quite limited resources. are three... driving Fibersport. Sometimes we find a competition and then we think this is maybe a match. But of course it's a new product, it's an invention. of course it gets recognized in this area. That's great. Yeah, it should be. It's very unique. Like you said, it should be something that's celebrated as a new innovation. I think I could see it winning lots of awards in the future. Very exciting. So. So what's next? Continued focus on CPG products and consumer product goods, or what's next? So since we have a background in the packaging industry, we have more naturally focused on packaging as a start. But we see also that there are other application areas that are super interesting to work on, like the horticultural segment for vineyards, plantations of tomatoes, because we know that they use cicta in some of these plantations. I think. idea. Yeah, using it in production of food. Yeah, excellent idea. That makes perfect sense because it will degrade over time. Exactly. And especially for the farmers that are growing organic food and so then this is a better alternative than zip ties. We also see a lot of interest from the marine industry. yes, they use a lot of zip ties and they end up in the ocean eventually. So we have tested Fibrestrap for some applications. Some companies have tested it to... They have used it for small submarines to protect... It's paper, so it will dissolve. It's not strong enough as it is now. This is a really interesting segment to continue to work with and try to find a good balance of how fast it will dissolve in water, for example. that's interesting. You could almost make it thicker or thinner to have it degrade at the right timeframe for, I'm thinking like crab pots or things like that, you know, they have some of those, that break during fishing and end up on the ocean floor. And then they have like a, a strap on a door that will open so it doesn't affect the sea life negatively after a certain amount of months in the water. Right. Exactly. And it has been tested actually for uh oyster farms in the Northern Sea. So when there is no load on the fiber strap, can actually keep... It doesn't dissolve so easily, but when you have certain load on it, it will dissolve. That's great. What an awesome opportunity. And yeah, for those listening, be sure to reach out to Sigrid. What's the best way for people to get in touch with you and your team? The best way is to either contact us on our Fiberscrap LinkedIn page or you can find all the other information also on our website. So we have an address where we all three founders look at it's team at fiberscrap.com so it's easy to find us there. Well, that's great. We'll put that in the show notes so people can reach out to you. And yeah, I really enjoyed uh speaking with you today. Thank you so much, Cory. It's pleasure to meet you and be here. Thank you.