Plastic Packaging Products From China

FUNCTIONS OF PACKAGING

Packaging performs a series of disparate tasks: it protects contents from contamination and spoilage, makes it easier to transport and store good and provides uniform measures of contents.14 By allowing brands to be created and standardized, it makes advertising meaningful and large-scale distribution possible. Special kinds of packages with dispensing caps, sprays and other convenience features make products more usable. Packages serve as symbols of their contents and a way of life and, just as they can very powerfully communicate the satisfaction a product offers, they are equally potent symbols of wastefulness once the product is gone.

     A package must do three things: it must protect the contents, promote the product and inform the consumer. A fourth function, convenience, is closely related to promotion since convenient packages promote sales.10

The functions of a food package were defined by the Codex Alimentarius Commission in 1985 as follows:

“Food is packaged to preserve its quality and freshness, add appeal to consumers and to facilitate storage and distribution.”

    As succinct as this definition might be, it is inadequate for those responsible for designing for designing and developing food packages. Four primary functions of packaging have been identified: containment, protection, convenience and communication. These four functions are interconnected and all must be assessed and considered simultaneously in the oackage development process.

Recycling of Plastic Packaging

In the U.S., recycling of plastic packaging began, on a limited scale, in the 1970s with recycling of PET soft drink bottles and HDPE milk bottles. Milk bottles were collected almost exclusively through drop-off programs, where people would bring clean empty bottles to some central location where they would be collected. Because only crude processing methods were available, labels on the milk bottles were a significant contaminant. Many programs asked residents to remove the labels, but in general met with extremely limited success. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, in one of the early programs, workers at the processing facility cut the labeled section of the bottle out with a utility knife and discarded it before sending the rest of the bottle through the grinder, in order to meet the purity requirements of the user, The recovery rate in such programs (amount of material collected for recycling compared to the amount available) was extremely low.

    Recycling of PET soft drink bottles was considerably more successful. The existence of bottle deposit programs in nine states (ten if California’s refund value system is included) provided a pool of collected material of consistent quality. Therefore, the early recycling efforts focused primarily on the processing and end use parts of the cycle. PET recycling also had the advantage of PET having superior properties and higher value than HDPE. By the mid 1980s,the PET recycling rate hovered around 20% in the U.S., almost exclusively due to recycling of deposit containers. There was some additional recycling of PET in non-deposit states, much of it through the Beverage Industry Recycling Program (BIRP), which was designed primarily to combat the passage of deposit legislation in additional states. Collection rates in these programs, even though some paid consumers for the containers they delivered, was comparable, to those in the drop-off DHPE milk bottle programs. Deposit programs, on the other hand, generally had redemption and recycling rates approaching 90%, or sometimes even higher.

    The definition of recycling rates requires some discussion. Until the late 1990s, the American Plastic Council calculated recycling rates as the amount of recovered material delivered to new markets divided by the amount of material available for collection, converted to a percentage . In the late 1990s, the APC changed the method of calculation to use the amount of material delivered to the processing center, rather than the amount coming out of the door for reuse, as the numerator, Since there are losses associated with recycling rates. APC argued that this action simply brought the methodology used in other industries. APC argued that this action simply brought the plastics industry’s method of reporting on recycling rates in accord with the methodology used in other industries, It certainly is true that this is the method of reporting recycling rates that is used in the paper industry. The glass industry, in addition to using quantities based on the amount of material delivered for processing, uses a formula that counts refillable containers as if they were recycled several times. In the metal industries, however, the calculation of recycling rates is based on the usable amount, rather than the total delivered amount. The change in methodologies sparked heated criticism from some environment groups. It is likely that the fact that the change in methodology occurred at the same time as the first decrease in the plastic recycling rates after a period of rapid growth, weather coincident or not, increased the criticism. Therefore it needs to be recognized that recycling rates reported by different entities may differ in both the data. Recycling rates coming from the U.S EPA Office of Solid Waste are usually based on industry reports about the amount of material recycled, so the differences in methodology affect that data, as well.

Characteristics of Flexible Packaging

 The major advantage of flexible packaging in economy. Flexible packaging makes very efficient use of both materials and space. The ratio of delivered product to package material is high, and use of cube is efficient, so distribution packaging can be smaller. Storage of unfilled packages occupies very little space, especially if they are stored as webstock. Forming packaging is generally rapid and simple. All of this contributes to lower cost.

    The primary disadvantages of flexible packaging are its lack of convenience for the user, and lack of strength. Flexible packaging has no appreciable ability to support a load, so secondary packaging must provide any strength that is required. Flexible packages tend to be difficult to open, and they are often impossible to reseal effectively.

    A number of developments have added to the consumer appeal of flexible packaging. One feature that is increasingly being used is zipper closures to provide reseal capability. Easy-peel seals have been developed to facilitate opening, and some of these provide for reclosure. Spouts have been added to some flexible packaging for dispensing, and some of this contain caps. While these features may add substantially to the package cost, they can also have a significant impact on seals, especially in markets where flexible packages compete against rigid containers.

     Historically, the way to compensate for the lack of rigidity and load-bearing capacity of flexible packaging has been to combined pouches with paperboard cartons or with corrugated fiberboard boxes in bag-in-box packages. Such packages are commonly used for dry products, such as breakfast cereal, as well as for liquid products, such as inexpensive wines. Stand-up pouch designs provide enough rigidity that a product, as the name indicates, can stand on the store shelf. Use of pouches has been retortability, allowing these pouches to substitute for rigid packages such as cans, as well as for paperboard cartons. Demand for pouches in the U.S is expected to reach nearly 80 billion units by 2006, for a total value of $4.6 billion. Flexible plastic packaging, for a number of years, has been the most rapidly growing segment of the packaging industry, accounting for about half of all use of plastics in packaging.

   The simplest form of flexible packaging is warp, a flat piece of material designed to the folded around the product in some way. Stretch warp and shrink warp are the most commonly used. In the chapter, we will consider package has occurred. These packages can be categorized as bags, envelopes, sacks, and pouches. All are made by folding and sealing the plastic together in some way. These terms are not clearly defined, and there is, consequently, quite a bit of overlap and confusion in the way the terms are used. Rather than attempting to order the flexible packaging universe into these neat categories, we will, instead, refer to such packages generically as pouches, when talking about smaller packages, and bags when talking about the large bulk packages.