Alan M. Malakoff

A New High-Performance mVLDPE

Metallocene polyethylenes are well known for providing superior toughness, heat sealing, and clarity when compared to the conventional polyethylenes. Their unique attributes have been employed for over a decade in the manufacture of many different types of blown and cast films for numerous end-use applications. A new family of very low density metallocene polyethylenes, defined here as mVLDPE, exhibits outstanding toughness and surprising heat seal and hot tack performance. Both monolayer and coex blown film studies have demonstrated that the unique properties of these mVLDPEs can be used to produce high-performance films for a wide variety of packaging applications. Selected data from these studies are used to demonstrate that the properties of these mVLDPEs are superior to those of conventional very low density polyethylenes (VLDPEs), linear low density polyethylenes (LLDPEs), metallocene linear low density polyethylenes (mLLDPEs), and ethylene vinyl acetate copolymers (EVAs).