Chapter Five - Sustainable manufacturing of plastic packaging material: An innovative approach

Abstract

Plastics touch our day to day life in various forms, and one of the fields it is extensively used in is packaging. It will be impossible to visualize our day to day life without the use of plastic packaging for all the daily essentials like food products and personal care items. In recent times, there had been intense pressure on packaging manufacturers and FMCG companies because of excessive use of plastics, short first use cycle of plastic packaging, high carbon footprint that the packaging leaves behind, and enormous quantity of plastic waste that ends up in water streams and as landfills. Further, sustainability is also a major concern as plastics is a nonrenewable resource. Hence, there is an immediate need to reduce the quantity of plastics used for packaging by downsizing and to enable primary recycling of all the packaging material used. Recycling is possible when we eliminate the use of dissimilar material that will prevent such recycling because of the immense challenges to segregate such dissimilar material in the packaging postconsumer use.