Packages are required in almost all sectors. While usually protecting the product and facilitating storage and transport, they can also help to differentiate products at the point of sale and thus constitute a selling point. In the past, packaging solutions have been consistently brought into line with market requirements and customer needs. Examples of this are distinctive crystal-clear bottles for household, and body and hair care products, sparkling high-quality plastic flacons for perfumes, special deep-drawn trays for electronics articles providing protection from electrostatic discharge and designed for product insertion by robot, and foldable transport boxes and stretch films for securing loads in trucks, to name but a few.
The food industry enjoys high attention and market importance within the packaging sector. In Europe countries alone, some 60% of foods still spoil, and this figure could be reduced significantly with appropriate packaging. What is more, according to a publication by packaging market researchers Gesellschaft für Verpackungsmarktforschung (GVM), product protection is always also climate protection, which in a turn is a subject of social relevance. The carbon footprint for the production of a new food to replace one lost due to inadequate product protection is usually much larger than that for the production of a suitable package that prevents spoilage.
The packaging sector continues to boom – and with it the requirements it has to meet, its possibilities and the innovative solutions. Its sheer diversity cannot be covered exhaustively in a single article, so only a selection of topics and examples have been picked out in the following without any claim to being comprehensive.
One subject repeatedly mentioned in connection with plastics packaging is health, although many different aspects are again concerned here. It goes without saying that each protective packaging benefits consumer health by shielding the food from external influences of all kinds. In the beverages sector in particular, there is a trend towards adding health-promoting substances to drinks that need special protection. Examples of this are fruit juices with high vitamin contents and sports and fitness drinks with special dietary supplements. KHS Plasmax GmbH in Hamburg has developed its Plasmax technology so that these drinks stay fresh in bottles for a long time. In a low-pressure plasma process, a roughly 50 nm layer of pure silicon oxide, i.e. glass, is deposited on the inner wall of a PET bottle. The drink thus keeps for longer, is protected from external influences and its vitamins and additives are prevented from escaping. Unlike the rival multi-layer bottle, the Plasmax technology is slightly more elaborate, but the cost of materials per bottle at about 1 cent per bottle is significantly lower. The main benefit of the Plasmax process is that the bottle can be fully recycled.
Another trend in the beverages sector is towards healthy drinks containing chunks, e.g. water with chunks of Aloe vera and milk and yoghurt drinks with fruit chunks. This calls not only for the matching bottle geometries, but also for bottling technologies capable of cleanly and precisely metering solid particles. As one of several specialist machine manufacturers in this area, Krones AG in Neutraubling is offering under its Dosaflex label special metering systems for lumpy products up to a size of 3x3x3 mm with a metering accuracy of ±0.3%. And on the subject of milk and yoghurt drinks, there is a distinct trend here to an expanding product spectrum. However, since dairy-based drinks have an only limited shelf life, Holland Colors NV in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, is presenting at K 2016 its new Holcomer III solid additive that permits the production of PET monoloyer packaging solutions for UHT milk as it yields 100% protection from UV radiation and up to 99% protection from visible light. The obvious advantage of this solution is its monolayer structure which lends itself better to recycling than the multi-layer equivalent.
