Moving beyond lightweighting to “green” plastics and/or bioplastics, what are your thoughts on the future?
Berlin: In terms of lightweighting and reducing packaging, I’m all for it, and maybe not for the same reasons others are. If you can reduce the amount of packaging and what goes into the landfills, that’s all good. But let’s face it, a lot of the sustainability effort has been a carefully cloaked effort to reduce costs — which is not a bad thing. But the whole lightweighting issue, framed in the sustainability debate, was really about reducing costs. In terms of whether the consumer is paying for “green” products, or “green” packaging, that’s another matter. Years ago, Berlin had an agreement with ICI with a product called Biopol. It was a biopolymer that was unlike the resin that’s mixed with cornstarch today. It was a truly biodegradable plastic that was manufactured by bacteria, of all things. It had all the properties of polyethylene, but was truly biodegradable in an anaerobic or aerobic environment. This was truly biodegradable material: You could injection mold it into closures,
