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Flexible Packaging
Zeroing in on food safety and sustainability Ensuring that food does not turn bad is the primary function of all forms of packaging. But flexible plastic packaging ensures much more, for example, ensuring sustainability, one of its many perks, says Angelica Buan in this report.
Plastics, a better fit for packaging Food spoilage and contamination are almost always linked to mishandling or inadequate hygiene during food preparation. Other important factors, including oxidation, temperature and exposure to light, are often overlooked as culpable factors. Though food and beverage packaging comes in a variety of materials, lately plastic flexible packaging has been scoring points for consumers and manufacturers alike. This is because plastic use lower environmental costs than other materials, a new study finds. UK-headquartered Trucost, in its latest study titled Plastics and Sustainability: A Valuation of Environmental Benefits, Costs, and Opportunities for Continuous Improvement, finds the environmental cost of using plastics in consumer goods and packaging is nearly four times less than it would be if plastics were replaced with alternative materials. Although alternative materials (glass, tin, aluminium and paper) are viable alternatives to plastic in many consumer goods applications, they incur higher environmental costs in the quantities needed to replace plastic. Based on Trucost’s assessment, substituting plastic with alternatives that perform the same function would increase environmental costs from US$139 billion to US$533 billion. One of the reasons for this savings is that because strong, lightweight plastics are able do more with less material, which provides environmental benefits throughout the lifecycle of plastic products and packaging, Trucost explains.
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SEPTEMBER 2016
The study also says that the environmental costs of alternative materials can be lower per tonne of production but are greater in aggregate due to the much larger quantities of material needed to fulfil the same purposes as plastics. To further reduce plastics’ overall environmental costs, the study recommends measures such as increasing the use of lowercarbon electricity in production of plastics, adopting lower-emission transport modes, developing even more efficient plastic packaging, and increasing recycling and conserving energy of post-use plastics, to help curb ocean litter and conserve resources. Fresh options to glass for wine packaging An unlikely product that can uncork the benefits of using flexible packaging is wine. Until recently, and with the changing consumption patterns, wine producers were resorting to packaging wine in heavy, chunky glass bottles that were more costly to ship than other packaging formats. Now, a cocktail of formats are used like bag-in-box containers, aseptic cartons, glass-like plastic bottles, and several other package types.
Swedbrand’s Top Flow technology, a plate in the bottom of the box, is attached to a spring that pushes the wine upwards