The industrial revolution during the 18th and 19th centuries revolutionised the packaging industry after hundreds of years of very basic packaging such as glass, wooden barrels, and tins. As well as resulting in new products, this era resulted in machines that could make paper bags, cartons and clingfilm. During the 20th century, technological advances led to the invention of shrinkwrap, bubble wrap, the pop tab for opening cans and plastic bottles. Further innovations included the addition of printed labels to packaging providing key customer information.
Read on to find out about current technologies use the packaging industry and what future innovations might be in store!
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Technology plays a pivotal role in terms of reducing production costs, increasing efficiencies, and adding new capabilities to the packaging itself such as marketing, labelling, prolonging shelf life and protecting the environment. With zero-waste packaging.
Modern ‘smart’ packaging includes integrated technology such as QR or RFID codes that allow real-time tracking, colour-changing indicators that monitor freshness or temperature of food items and embedded audio files to enhance the customer experience. Technology has also had an impact on packaging aesthetics with products having a highly visual appearance (luxury touches as well as branding). Physical considerations can also be implemented, for instance addition of braille to increase diversity, or use of materials that are haptically pleasing, particularly when the packaging is also the product (e.g., top shelf alcohol bottles). Mobile robotic platforms have also dramatically improved efficiencies.
There’s also been a movement towards enhancing sustainability through reducing resource consumption and waste, for example, in the shrinkwrap industry.
Shrinkwrap involves the application of heat to film that shrinks snugly around a product. Nowadays, shrinkwrap machinery is available in a variety of automated options: manual, semi-automatic and automatic. The introduction of machinery saves costs on volume of film, manual labour costs and reduced waste management. Even better, these machines can be used with newer environmentally friendly shrinkwrap products such as sugarcane polyolefin shrinkwrap.
Given the importance of packaging appearance and sustainability to today’s consumers, technological innovations will continue to revolutionise the industry. The following packaging technologies are in existence but not yet widely adopted:
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