Is Plastic Packaging a Modern-day Solution?

Plastic packaging has been regularly criticized lately, often wrongly. With a scientific consideration of the ecological benefit, resp. the pollution of a packaging, on the one hand its own ecological balance, on the other hand its ecological benefit that it perceives through its function, must be taken into account.

The slogan “no packaging is the best packaging” may be true for some products, but it is mostly wrong, especially for food. Packaging protects the food and thus extends its shelf life. With its excellent barrier properties and tightness, plastic packaging in particular makes a significant contribution to preventing food waste. When considering the ecological balance of food packaging as a whole, avoiding food waste is actually more important than the ecological balance of the packaging per se.

A comprehensive study of the life cycle assessment of beverage packaging has shown that the life cycle assessment of PET packaging is absolutely comparable to that of cardboard packaging and significantly better than that of aluminum or glass packaging, especially since the production process consumes much less energy and thus CO2, which is also in comparison to cardboard.

Plastic foils with recycled content are resource-efficient. By choosing the right material and design, dimensionally stable packaging can be recycled and fed into the circular economy. Due to the expansion of recycling capacities worldwide, the oil consumption of plastic packaging will continue to decrease in the future.

When designing and developing packaging solutions, the Stäger Packaging Group takes a recycling-friendly construction into account and focuses on a high proportion of recycled material of up to 100%. Stäger has extensive experience and consulting competence with regard to the availability, properties and applications of foil products made from biodegradable, renewable material and also offers these.