Accelerating development of projects with great potential to impact the circular economy

“We went to the field of a small farmer, and there were chunks of plastic throughout the whole field, which will probably never go away...

It was from years and years of it not being completely pulled up at the end of the season.”

As a product development manager on the WestRock Research and Development team, Cas Siegling is splitting his time between his office in Richmond, Virginia and crop fields in Live Oak, Florida. He’s part of a small incubation team working to develop a sustainable, paper-based alternative for what farmers call “plastic mulch”—a black polyethylene film used to line fields of crops to suppress weeds, retain moisture and increase soil temperature.

“It’s one of those situations where you hear about plastic mulch and might see a picture of it, but when you go to a farm, it’s different. When you see it in the real world ... That’s one of the things that I think has been a driving factor for me.”

Why a plastic mulch replacement?

For innovators like Siegling, the potential impact of what they do is realized when they get a chance to see the issues they’re attempting to solve up close and personal. The reality of what happens to black mulch once the crop season is over is that it’s usually pulled up and taken to a landfill or incinerated.

Removing it is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and every season a lot of plastic fragments are left to sit in the fields. Those fragments get plowed into the soil when it’s prepared for the next season. Polyethylene plastic isn’t biodegradable, and photodegradable versions of plastic mulch only break down into microplastics.

As of 2012, farmers around the world used 4 million tons of plastic mulch, and Transparency Market Research estimated a rise in usage of almost six percent annually between 2022 and 2026. While use is rising, so are global bans on single use plastics, both at a national and regional level, and that’s sent many businesses running to WestRock to replace their plastic packaging with sustainable alternatives—another reason the WestRock innovation team made a move to put this project on the fast track.

As fast as farming allows

The effort to fast-track the development of this product was unique in many ways. The team couldn’t accelerate the project by choosing to run real-world trials on their paper-based mulch around the clock since they were bound by crop cycles.

“Our opportunity to perform trials is between February and April every year,” said Siegling. “If you perform a trial and fail, you can’t simply come back in May and try something new. You have to wait another year before trying another iteration.”

Additionally, WestRock often partners with well-established customers to test new products in the marketplace, but the team couldn’t do that in this case. Testing involves a risk for failure, and you can’t take high-stakes chances with fields that need to yield actual product. It could be financially devastating for a farmer to lose part of their crop to a failed trial.

To work around these limitations, the R&D team knew they needed the right university partner, one that could provide good testing grounds (or fields) and supply plentiful and accurate data. The team partnered with the University of Florida’s Agriculture Extension to begin trials of different iterations, testing multiple in one planting season. Collecting data from multiple trials in one season would guide them in creating the next several product iterations to test in the next season.

“Our team performed trials with the University and had failures at times. We’d analyze all the data from the failure models, and return the next year with a number of different trial conditions that specifically addressed that failure mode, which would then expose another type of failure.”

Siegling says recent changes to the structure of WestRock’s innovation team has also helped them fast-track development. With any innovation, there are many people and departments that need to collaborate to make it happen, but Siegling says the New Product Introduction team has been instrumental in their ability to push forward.

“We now have a person who is responsible for pushing a project over the commercialization finish line, which allowed this project to move along faster, in my opinion.”

Plowing over failure with perseverance

Determination is an important part of accelerating and completing any product development project, but especially for this one.  Experimenting with new materials and products inevitably means there will be failures that don’t achieve the desired results. With this project, those disappointing learning moments could be drawn out over years, making perseverance and drive more necessary in the innovation team’s work.

For Siegling, seeing pieces of plastic mixed in the dirt throughout acres of farmland is burned in his mind forever. While that is a main driver, it’s also been important for him to keep his mind on all the potential benefits:

• The potential of eliminating tons of plastic waste
• Eliminating further ground contamination with microplastics
• Eliminating the need for farmers to spend time and labor removing the product
• Enriching soil quality instead of degrading it
• And a bonus—the opportunity to test whether it could positively impact crop yield

The WestRock approach to innovation

While Siegling and the rest of the team have decades of experience in developing new products, each project still brings new lessons, especially as they focus on products with great potential to contribute to the circular economy. Even as a veteran researcher, he’s learning WestRock is willing to continue to invest in testing and development when there’s the potential for major impact.

“It would have been very simple to say, ‘Well, it didn’t work well enough. Move on.’  But the team stuck with it, and it became an example of how we approach research at WestRock. Our team found out that if we have a justifiable reason to continue, WestRock is going to push forward.”

When businesses need a plastic replacement but they’re not finding what they’re looking for, that’s where WestRock Innovation steps in to ideate. Our team has created specific innovations in partnership with our customers, in addition to initiating projects where there’s great potential, such as in agriculture. Contact our team to get started on a new solution.