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2020 Perspectives on 2030 Packaging

Should these packaging visions come to pass, packagers and their packaging technology vender/partners will continue to find efficient, sustainable ways to identify, protect, and distribute products to their consumer and industrial customers.

Ben Miyares

Metal (tin/lead) toothpaste tubes. PVC liquor bottles. Acrylonitrile-butadiene styrene apple juice cans. Cone-top tinplate beverage cans. Once these were cutting edge packaging concepts. But you won’t find them on any retail shelves any more. If you do spot them on your next online shopping run, you’re probably a nostalgic packaging junkie googling vintage packages to add to the mostly obsolete packages you’re keeping wrapped in old newspapers in corrugated boxes on a shelf in your basement.

By 2030 packaging in North America may look different and work better than it does today but we’re betting it will still be composed of the same materials, more or less, that packaging has been made of since the mid-20th century: paper, plastic, metal, and glass.

But while the packaging materials used will be somewhat familiar, indications are that the proportions in which they are used in 2030 will be different. And the technologies to make, fill, label, and seal the container will be streamlined to improve efficiency, conserve energy and material resources, and reduce waste.

Moving into the 2030s, no link in the packaging/processing supply chain will go unchanged. Package manufacturing, package functionality, and post-user disposition will all be adjusted to improve performance over longer time periods.

Odds are packaging in 2030, compared to today’s, will be functionally and structurally more diverse and characterized by:

Higher barriers with less bulk and weight. Of all the packaging characteristics envisioned here, higher barriers and lighter weights will have the greatest impact on container manufacturing, filling-labeling-sealing, marketing, distribution, and post-first use container material disposition. This is not only one of the broadest trends in containers, but one that’s been going on for the longest time. A prime example of this long-term light weighting is the 12-oz aluminum beer can that today comes in at about half an ounce (14.2 g). When introduced in the 1960s, it weighed twice that much.

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