Manufacturers of products and packages are experiencing various challenges in today’s competitive marketplace. They have to take care of demands such as cost reduction, improving performance and more importantly enhancing environmental aspects. The material that a manufacturer chooses to use in its products and packages decides whether they have the ability to withstand this competition.
Plastic packaging films have allowed manufacturers to meet various demands by enabling them to do more with less. Hence, it becomes important to understand what a packaging film is, how it is used, how it contributes towards resource conservation and how it actually helps manufacturers to respond to the ever-changing market scenario. Also, it is important to understand what role packaging films plays in reducing the amount of waste generated.
Plastic packaging films comprise a wide category of materials that can be simple or complex depending on the demand of a particular product or package. Just like a plastic bottle and container, the film can be made with different resins, each of which has unique properties that make it appropriate for certain applications. For instance, Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE) film is necessary for packaging things like chicken, which would quickly spoil if exposed to oxygen as it acts as a gas barrier. On the other hand, Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) film is used for packaging things such as red meat that require a small amount of oxygen inside the package in order to remain fresh. Unlike LDPE film, PVC film is gas absorptive. Packaging film can be single or multilayered, clear or colored, printed or plain and combined with materials like aluminum and paper. The only thing that all packaging film has in common is its flexible nature.
Use of Packaging Film in different sectors
The usage of plastic film is divided into two categories – Packaging and Non-packaging. This can also be broken down into smaller components such as film used for food items, non-food items, and other items. The film under these categories can vary by resin and color; may be made of one layer of plastic or as many as ten layers depending on the complexity of the package. Other materials such as aluminum or paper may be used with the packaging film in order to impart special properties.
- Food packaging film – It is used to produce things like in-store bags; film for all non-frozen baked goods; bakery bread and bun bags; tray covers for institutional deliveries of bakery products; boil-in-bags (film used to contain food prepared by keeping it in the package and placing it in boiling water); candy and confection bags and wrappers; bags-in-a-box (film used to contain fluid in a supportive box, such as boxed wine); carton liners (for such products as cake mixes); meat, poultry and seafood wraps (such as hot dog and bacon film).
Use of film in food packaging applications is not just restricted to the polyethylene family. It is noteworthy that LDPE is the polyethylene resin used most often in food packaging; it accounts for 65.5 percent of the total.
- Non-food packaging film – This refers to things such as industrial liners (film used for frozen pork box liners and liners for shipments of nuts and bolts); bubble packing, envelopes, multiwall sack liners, overwrap, and rack and counter bags; shipping sacks (film used to protect and/or contain contents such as bark and mulch bags). LDPE is the polyethylene resin used most frequently for non-food packaging applications. It composes 54.9 percent of the polyethylene used in nonfood packaging.
- Other Packaging – The other types of packaging in which film is used are Stretch and Shrinkwrap. As the name suggests, stretch wrap is a strong, highly flexible film that can be stretched to take the shape of a product. Shrink wrap is a plastic film that is applied loosely around products, sealed by heating the seams and shrunk through a heating process to take the shape of the products.
