Biodegradable Pressure Sensitive Adhesive Compound

About This Product

This is a PBAT-based compound, supplied as a pellet compound for conversion into pressure sensitive adhesive for label stock and tape. Poly(butylene adipate-co-terephthalate) is an aliphatic-aromatic copolyester, soft, low in modulus and slow to crystallise rather than rigid, which is what lets an adhesive built on it stay permanently tacky at ambient temperature instead of setting hard. It is biodegradable at end of life.

The reason to build a pressure sensitive adhesive on this chemistry is what happens after use. A label travels with the pack into whatever waste stream it ends up in, and its adhesive goes with it. On a certified compostable pack a conventional acrylic pressure sensitive adhesive is a contaminant, and labelling is one of the commonest reasons a pack fails certification. The difference is in the backbone: an acrylic adhesive is held together by carbon-carbon bonds, which offer nothing for water or for the organisms in an active compost to cleave, so it survives the process as a fine, tacky residue spread through the output. A copolyester chain is held together by ester links, which hydrolysis can break and which those organisms can then work on, so the adhesive follows the pack rather than outliving it. What the compound is supplied to do is give the adhesive formulator that end-of-life behaviour without giving up the adhesive itself, and the adhesive properties are quoted the way an adhesive buyer uses them: tack, peel and shear are set against the facestock and the substrate, not in isolation, because the same adhesive behaves differently behind a paper face than behind a film one. Supplied as a raw material for processing on your own line. We do not produce finished articles.

It is used in biodegradable adhesive manufacture, compostable labels and tape, bio-based polymer systems and by packaging converters.

Bio Green Oleo supplies the biodegradable pressure sensitive adhesive compound to specification on polymer base, pellet form and the tack, peel and shear required against your nominated facestock and substrate.