The British Plastics Federation’s Packaging Group (BPF) is promoting plastic this month. And it is not having to work too hard. 75% of the UK market would rather use a plastic tomato sauce bottle than a glass one.
Philip Law, director general designate of the BPF, stated, “Not only does plastics packaging address society’s sustainability goals, it gets the basic job done extraordinarily well – protecting the product and helping the consumer to use it easily.”
Meanwhile, Visiongain’s Glass Packaging Market Forecast 2014-2024: Future Prospects for Leading Players has indicated that glass remains a contender. The glass packaging market, it reported, will be worth US$39.4b in 2014, driven by growth in both emerging and developed markets as well as a number of design and technological advances made in end-use consuming sectors.
A proliferation of advances in plastic packaging is putting a lot of pressure on glass, especially in the food sector. Pouches, in particular, are making large inroads fast.
The report states: “Glass packaging is facing increasing competition from rival packaging materials that are stronger, lighter and cheaper to manufacture and transport, as experienced in many of the glass packaging submarkets. Glass is up to seven times heavier than the equivalent volume of plastic, a significant difference. This means that glass packaging is more expensive to transport than rival materials, and glass’ brittleness also added increased risk to transporting glass packaging. One key benefit of the higher weight of glass packaging is its ability to be stacked in an efficient manner to somewhat offset the increased costs of transportation.”
Visiongain predicts that the growth of pouch packaging will erode glass packaging sales most in its traditional strongholds - baby food, sauces and coffee.
Glass, it states, will become obsolete in pharmaceutical packaging as increasingly complex packaging such as blister packaging and advanced secondary paper packaging take over.
Beverage packaging will remain strong for glass. Glass is the second largest beverage packaging material behind plastic. That is not expected to vary significantly, with the demand for quality and luxury packaging for alcohol keeping glass in a position of strength.
But...? Yes, that tricky environmental repsonsibility poser. Here's an update about plastic's role in that:
A newly released study, “Impact of Plastics Packaging on Life Cycle Energy Consumption & Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the United States and Canada,” is showing that retaining six major categories of plastic packaging may, in fact, help to reduce energy use.
The study assessed the energy requirements and greenhouse gas emissions of six categories of plastic packaging in general use in the US and Canada: caps and closures, beverage containers, other rigid containers, carrier (or shopping) bags, stretch/shrink wrap, and other flexible packaging.
It used used life-cycle assessment methodology to compare current amounts of various plastic packaging products to packaging made with alternative materials.
The assessment used a 2010 as the baseline and found that replacing all plastic packaging with non-plastic alternatives for these six types of packaging in the U.S. would:
• Require 4.5 times as much packaging material by weight, increasing the amount of packaging used in the U.S. by nearly 55 million tons (110 billion lb)
• Increase energy use by 80%—equivalent to the energy from 91 oil supertankers
• Result in 130% more global warming potential—equivalent to adding 15.7 million more cars to our roads.
The full study is viewable here.
Its summary states in part: "Plastic packaging has many properties that are vitally important for packaging applications, including light weight, flexibility, durability, cushioning, and barrier properties, to name a few. This substitution analysis demonstrates that plastic packaging is also an efficient choice in terms of energy and global warming impacts.
"For the six packaging categories analyzed [sic] – caps and closures, beverage containers, stretch and shrink film, carrier bags, other rigid packaging, and other flexible packaging – 14.4 million metric tonnes of plastic packaging were used in the US in 2010. If other types of packaging were used to substitute US plastic packaging, more than 64 million metric tonnes of packaging would be required. The substitute packaging would require 80 percent more cumulative energy demand and result in 130 percent more global warming potential impacts, expressed as CO2 equivalents, compared to the equivalent plastic packaging."
