| By CurTec International |
| Tuesday, 30 June 2009 |
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“Over 3.5 billion are lost to the costs of packaging, packaging should add value and not be seen as waste”, says Professor Roland ten Klooster.
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Better packaging can lead to a better product, he claims, which is why he suggests to revise and professionalize the development processes.
Everybody has an opinion about packaging. It’s like football, everyone’s an expert! Its association with environmental problems is often heard. Unfortunately, there are few people who know the ins and outs of packaging.
Looking at packaging without looking at the product it protects is pointless. Product and packaging go hand in hand and need to be analyzed together.
The development of a product has to be in tandem with the development of the packaging.
In this paper the issue of packaging will be introduced and discussed, and packaging will be given the place it deserves.
The average person opens |
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7 packaged products a day, which translates into 140,000 kilos over an average lifetime. 43 billion packaged products are opened every year in the Netherlands alone.
Estimates of the European Community indicate 25,000 packaged products are opened every second. At an average weight of 25 gram, (1) this is 37,500 kg a minute!
Some people claim that the amount of packaging is increasing slowly.
Cultural and demographic developments, knowledge of other cultures, the wish for fresher products and more variety in taste influence the amount of packaging. People hardly have any idea of numbers in the so called ‘World of Packaging’.
Over one million bags of crisps, regular taste, are sold every week. If there’s football on television, more than three million bottles of beer may be opened.
The average speed of filling equipment is 60 a minute. Fillers of cans of beer can do more than 90,000 cans per hour. It is clear that standardization is important in this part of business. |
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About 38% of packaging is plastic, 35% is fibre based material (paper, board, corrugated board, pulp), 12% is metal and about 10% is glass.
The rest, about 5%, is wood (pallets and boxes), jute, cotton, biologically degradable materials (starch, polylactides) and others. Worldwide about 66% of packaging materials is used for food. In Western countries this figure is slightly lower and is estimated at 60%.
In countries where food protection is important, more food is being thrown away, strangely enough, because of bad packaging and a lower state of technology.
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