Founded in 2012 in response to the country’s Twelfth Five Year Plan, Greenpak (Qingyang Town, Jiangyin / China; www.greenpak.com.cn) is reportedly China’s first barrier film producer located in the greater Shanghai area. Since then, the company has become a key supplier of functional packaging film for the food and industrial sectors, working together with US partners like Dow Chemical (Midland, Michigan / USA; www.dow.com), ExxonMobil (Baytown, Texas / USA; www.exxonmobil.com) and DuPont (Wilmington, Delaware / USA; www.dupont.com), among others.

However, it was a collaboration with a German player – Reifenhäuser (Troisdorf; www.reifenhauser.com) – that allowed Greenpak to first enter the barrier film market. After installing one of the German machinery company’s “Evolution” blown film lines in 2013, Greenpak has been able to produce symmetric and asymmetric film for the food and packaging industries. The start-up, processes a number of different materials, including PE, PP, PA and EVOH, receives technical support from Reifenhäuser’s Chinese subsidiary, located in Suzhou.

Whereas multi-layer co-extruded film is widely used in North America and Europe, it is only just beginning to penetrate the Chinese market, Greenpak said, adding that its main uses in the People’s Republic are in the food and electronic processing industries. The former is a field that will never be affected by an economic downturn, the company said, predicting that by the end of this decade, the use of multi-layer co-extruded film will have become much more commonplace in China.