A few decades ago going green and eco-friendly was considered a niche concept. Today it’s the need of the hour. With an assertive force to promote sustainability, participating in creating a circular economy should now become the agenda for most packaging companies. With packaging materials contributing to about 65% of the global solid waste, of the 6.3 billion tons of plastic, only an estimated 9% has been recycled, 12% has been incinerated, and the rest is trapped as pollution on both land and oceans. As responsible citizens of planet Earth, it is our prerogative to play our parts in preserving the environment around us. Embracing sustainable packaging is the road to take.
What is Sustainable Packaging?
Also called eco-friendly and environmentally-friendly, creating packaging that is sourced, developed and used as packaging solutions leaving a minimal environmental impact and footprint is called sustainable packaging. It upholds the sustainability protocol “reduce, reuse, recycle” at all points – from production to the end of its lifestyle to recovery and reuse.
Criteria for Sustainable Packaging
Sustainable packaging involves a perfect combination of achieving business objectives while upholding environmental considerations throughout the lifecycle of packaging. The package should be designed and created in such a way that it continues to remain secure, useful, and fit for all living and non-living elements throughout its lifecycle.
· It should optimize both performance and cost.
· It should use renewable energy while sourcing, manufacturing, transportation, and recycling
· The packaging should be manufactured optimizing clean production technologies and best practices.
· Innovative materials that remain healthy throughout their lifecycle should be used.
· It should effectively be recovered and utilized in biological or industrial closed-loop cycles.
Why Do We Need Sustainable Packaging?
Almost all industries including pharmaceuticals, FMCG, Food & Beverage and textiles need plastic packaging as primary packaging to safeguard products from oxygen, moisture, microbes and odour permeation. Generally, plastics such as Polypropylene (PP), Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET), Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE), High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) are used, that stay undisturbed over a long period contaminating the environment. Several industries, including food & beverage, pharmaceutical, textile, etc., rely on plastics. An estimated 8.8 million metric tons of plastic waste is thrown into the oceans and coastal areas every year that can take several hundreds of years to decompose if they do at all. Without intervention, by 2050, there will be more plastics in the ocean than fish. Every day we read in the papers the deteriorating parameters of the quality of air, water, and soil. With increasing pollution, rising global temperatures and unpredictable natural calamities the effect of uncontrolled patterns of consumption has become evident. We need to mend our ways and look at a solution that is innovative and life-enhancing. Choosing sustainable packaging is the way forward.
The Montage Group is taking firm steps towards a zero impact of packaging. As a part of our corporate social responsibility, we endeavour to start the process of reducing the carbon footprint in nature. Our R&D team is constantly innovating and creating product designs that match the requirements of the client, the needs of the customers and our sensibilities towards creating a circular economy.