A helping hand to future; sustainable packaging.

The main step that food assemblers, processors must take, after performing necessary preparatory operations of cleaning, processing, preserving of the lot, to maintain the product well being is to package it accurately efficiently so that no product perils remain more. In supply chain management, the producers as well as consumers are much more concerned about sustainability, making more returns by lowering packaging costs, hence both are benefited. The packaging sector represents round about 2% of the gross national product (GNP) in developed countries, and about half of all packaging is used to package food, so can you imagine this situation in developing or underdeveloped countries?

Only 14% of plastic packaging used is globally recycled (Ellen MacArthur Foundation) report. It is to be estimated that in 2050 our oceans are filled with plastics, not with marine life.

The sustainability of the package is used to check and keep balance in the environment and ecological footprints. It causes an increment in the use of life cycle inventory (LCI) and life cycle assessment. LCI is the assimilation and quantitative analysis of inputs and outputs of a given food product system through its life cycle. Sustainable packaging is removable, reusable, reducible, renewable, recyclable, revenue-generating, and restore at once, it follows the 7R strategy.

Several solutions are emerging to face this challenge. They are focused on three aspects: the antimicrobial agent; the packaging material; and the technological implication in the final production of packaging. Biotechnology is expected to play a central role in the future food to solve central points, as retain the integrity and actively prevent food spoilage. In this phase, several projects are moving, still waiting to converge in adequate products. The galaxy of smart packaging is rapidly moving and increasing in researches. This phase represents a chaotic period of several proposals production and tentative in solving the food preservative problems, using new technologies and advanced techniques, like nanotechnology. Waiting the collapse into a central paradigm, it is interesting and useful to follow the scenario of researches on smart packaging based on natural products here reported.

Materials in use for increasing packaging sustainability:

Paper-based packaging/ layered cardboard is ecologically friendly. But it can’t be used for oily or wet food products. So for this purpose, we use sustainable plastic packaging techniques like returnable hard plastic totes, it can minimize CO2 emission in the environment due to plastic degradation. The PureCycle technology had been developed to recycle polypropylene plastic which is further used as an input for food and beverage packaging industries.

Biodegradable plastics are benefited to the environment causing less and reduced wastage of food packaging materials. The new concept of oxo-biodegradable plastics plays a major role in the degradation of packaging material by the oxidative and cell-mediated phenomenon of the biodegradable material. As society being led to believe that they safely degrade in nature, but it still releases its microplastic constituents in the environment hence oxo-biodegradable is not compostable.

Here are the factors that describe the sustainability of packaging design

1. Use of minimal material like reduced layers of the package
2. Lower mass like the low product to package weight ratio.

Hence, summing up the discussion there is much more work that needs to be done for sustainable packaging techniques and technologies which are cost-effective and energy-efficient.