Award-winning, high-quality, reusable, recyclable barrier silage bag preserves vital animal feed for longer
Horgen, Switzerland – December 14, 2020 – Dow (NYSE: DOW) and Packaging Industries Limited (PIL) announce Mama Silage Bags – a breakthrough silage storage technology for small-scale dairy farmers in Kenya. The Mama Silage innovative bags are designed to help improve silage storage and reduce waste. By enabling Kenyan farmers to better preserve animal feed for dairy cows, it helps to provide a steady supply of milk and, consequently, a steady income for farmers throughout the year.The Mama Silage Bag is designed with a unique multilayer film structure containing Dow’s high-performance ELITE™ Enhanced Polyethylene Resins & INNATE™ Precision Packaging Resins, which gives the bag strength and toughness, making it durable and enabling longer shelf storage and multiple reuses.
Responding to climate challenges
The solution is a response to the need for farmers to adapt to erratic weather conditions that make the availability of animal feed a constant issue. While traditional silage storage methods have many shortfalls, Mama Silage Bags can help farmers to improve and preserve the nutritional quality of silage with minimal wastage, enabling high milk production levels and a sustained and predictable income across the year.
“Dow’s unique technology has helped us develop a solution that can truly tackle the needs of a growing and demanding market. With 80 percent of the milk produced in Kenya coming from smallholder dairy farmers, the local community was urgently seeking a solution that could help them reduce losses caused by traditional silage storage methods,” commented Vaishali Malde, product development manager for Packaging Industries Limited. ‘’With Mama Silage Bag's innovation, farmers can now better manage their animal feed needs and cope with uncertain climatic conditions.”
The Mama Silage Bag innovation has been the first project in which Packaging Industries Limited has explored the opportunity to become a brand owner for an agricultural packaging product, looking to address a gap in sustainable incomes for the dairy sector in their region.
“Mama Silage Bag has been a self-learning collaborative project”, said Leonard Kareko, Dow account manager for agricultural films in Kenya. “We had to connect and speak directly with the farmers in Kenya. We also had to train them in their local language so they could appreciate the added value the product can bring to the table. For us, Mama Silage’s success goes beyond the product itself. It’s about developing a solution which truly has farmers in mind by helping them overcome their greatest challenges. We couldn’t have done it without the extensive market knowledge of our valued partner, Packaging Industries Limited.”
Kristen Bovid, Dow Global Citizenship program officer, further explains “At Dow, we see the role of business as a catalyst for change, a driver not only for sustainable and innovative solutions, but also for solutions that have a social impact. We could not be prouder of the opportunities this project represents for the communities.”
2020 Packaging Innovation Awards Winner
Mama Silage Bags was recently recognized with the gold award in the 2020 Packaging Innovation Awards (PIA). The Packaging Innovation Award is the industry’s longest running, independently judged packaging awards program, and recognizes breakthrough packaging achievements in design, technology, sustainability, and user experience.
About Packaging Industries Limited
Packaging Industries Limited is a lead manufacturer of high-quality, responsible and sustainable flexible packaging for food, beverage, health care, home and personal care and other products. With over 35 years of manufacturing experience, PIL specialize in extended shelf life packaging, giving products longer life and reducing food waste, a global problem. Their packaging is designed to cater for the user’s requirements and customized for their needs.
About Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics
Packaging and Specialty Plastics (P&SP), a business unit of Dow (NYSE: DOW), combines core strengths of R&D, worldwide reach, broad product lines and industry expertise to deliver high performing technologies for end use markets in food packaging, personal hygiene, infrastructure, consumer goods and transportation. P&SP is one of the world’s largest producers of polyethylene resins, functional polymers, and adhesives, and - enabled by Pack Studios - is a leading innovator and collaborator across the value chain on sustainable application development and circular economy life-cycle design for plastics. www.dowpackaging.com
About Dow
Dow (NYSE: DOW) combines global breadth, asset integration and scale, focused innovation and leading business positions to achieve profitable growth. The Company’s ambition is to become the most innovative, customer centric, inclusive and sustainable materials science company. Dow’s portfolio of plastics, industrial intermediates, coatings and silicones businesses delivers a broad range of differentiated science-based products and solutions for its customers in high-growth market segments, such as packaging, infrastructure and consumer care. Dow operates 109 manufacturing sites in 31 countries and employs approximately 36,500 people. Dow delivered sales of approximately $43 billion in 2019. References to Dow or the Company mean Dow Inc. and its subsidiaries. For more information, please visit www.dow.com or follow @DowNewsroom on Twitter.
For further information contact:
Dow Europe GmbH
Ana Braga
+41 44 728 21 54
ABBraga@dow.com
Packaging Industries Limited
Dip Shah
+254 722 523 386
Dip@pil.co.ke