With growing levels of global consumption packaging has evolved as a crucial point of focus today as FMCG companies and other businesses stay committed to creating the most efficient environmental ‘footprint’ for their products. The value of the Indian flexible packaging market is expected to reach a value of INR 640.38 billion by FY 2023, and growth is projected for nearly all end-user markets—from food and pharmaceutical to personal care and household products. Yet, the flexible packaging industry is mired with the negative reputation of litter and marine debris. As the Director of Montage Group and having over 25 years of experience in this field, I present the top 5 reasons that prove Flexible Packaging is energy efficient and the most suitable option for environmental sustainability.
Reduced Carbon Emissions
Each packaging product releases some amount of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases during its life cycle, including production, shipping, storage, the use and reuse period and ultimate disposal. In a holistic point of view, flexible packaging has the least carbon emission in comparison to other packaging materials like metal, glass and paper available today.
Improved Shipping Logistics
The nature of flexible packaging makes products compact and lightweight thereby reducing the number of trucks, vans and ships needed during logistics for shipping and transport. This greatly saves on precious fuel cost. This in turn places a significant role in enhancing the environmental and economic efficiency of consumer product packaging. It offers an augmented product-to-package ratio for less resource consumption and reduced total waste directly improving efficiency. Statistics prove that flexi-packaging saves weight by 78% as compared to other packaging alternates and needs 4 per cent lower cargo space than glass containers to pack the same quantity of product. Especially during the lockdown where there was a dire shortage of transportation drivers flexi-packaging with space-saving advantages greatly supported in reducing overall transportation and logistics costs and helped widen the distribution reach.
Fewer Natural Resources
The sustainability aspect of multi-layer packaging becomes evident when we view it as the complete life cycle of the product. Principally, flexi-packaging uses less material in its production process, making it a highly conducive eco-friendly option in comparison to its rigid packaging competitors. Moreover, the usage of water and other energy sources like fossil fuel is also significantly lower than glass, cloth and paper board packaging options.
Longer Shelf Life
This is especially true for food products. Food items that have simple plastic covers and cloth bags tend to get spoilt early. On the contrary, flexible packaging helps increase the shelf life for goods and in turn, saves consumers’ money while reducing waste and global greenhouse gases. No wonder, flexi packaging has evolved as the preferred choice for FMCG good manufacturers and supermarket and grocery retailers.
Dream Disposal
At the end of its useful life, flexible packaging requires less landfill space in comparison to its alternate packaging competitors and holds only 4 per cent of the packaging material in landfills. Its packaging efficiency is almost twice of a regular plastic container. Even materials like steel cans with high rates of recycling need almost four times more landfill space multi-layer packaging.
Power-packed with an inherent ability to reduce carbon footprint by decreasing waste, increasing shelf life, reducing the amount of energy in production and shipping and disposal flexible packaging has proved its mettle as the undisputable ‘Hero’ of the FMCG packaging sector in terms of energy conservation and sustainability.