Plastic Flexible Packaging Goes Green: BOPP Film, Food Safety and Market Growth

Rising living standards have brought the safety of plastic packaging into wider public view. As materials and processing technologies continue to evolve, plastic flexible packaging is taking on a growing role across many fields, and colorization of plastic flexible packaging film has now become one of the major trends.

Plastic flexible packaging can handle the varied protection requirements of goods and clearly extend food shelf life. Its packaging process is straightforward, and operation and use are convenient; it delivers pack formats with approachability; it reduces packaging and transport costs; and it offers advantages such as low resource and energy consumption and environmental compatibility.

Today, a growing share of the liquids, semi-liquids, powdered foods and solid foods we consume daily is packed in plastic. Relevant data show that the Southeast Asian food industry's plastic flexible packaging market reached USD 1.414 billion in 2008 and is expected to grow to USD 2.023 billion by 2015, an average annual growth rate of 6.7%. This indicates that as plastic flexible packaging finds more applications in the food industry, it will become the mainstream of food packaging in the future.

The development direction of plastic flexible packaging film is very clear, and many companies are accelerating the pace of large-scale production alongside product structure adjustment. On the whole, China's flexible packaging industry has already established its own basic industrial chain, and high value-added products are emerging continuously.

On the green development path of flexible packaging, BOPP plastic film is a very important material. It is colorless, odorless, tasteless and non-toxic, and offers high tensile strength, impact strength, rigidity, toughness and good transparency. Yet it also has shortcomings: it easily accumulates static electricity, lacks heat-sealing properties, is difficult to recycle and is prone to contamination.

Building on its existing focus on quality and efficiency, China's flexible packaging industry is paying more attention to energy saving, consumption reduction, emission reduction and safety. Technologies must therefore be strengthened to solve the problem of BOPP plastic film being prone to contamination. For plastic flexible packaging to achieve substantial development, improving production technology and reducing raw material use is the necessary path.

With the rapid growth of the modern food industry, plastic flexible packaging has become the main method of food packaging. As flexible packaging gradually becomes the leading material for food packaging and society pays ever greater attention to food safety, the hygiene and safety of plastic flexible packaging is increasingly in the spotlight. The main hygiene and safety issues in food flexible packaging center on the toxicity of monomers in packaging resin materials and excessive residual amounts of solvents such as inks, adhesives and additives.

Source: China Packaging Network (news.pack.cn), original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-373438.html. Copyright belongs to the original author; this article is shared for industry exchange and learning only.