Plastics allow packaging to perform many necessary tasks and provide thereby important properties such as strength and stiffness, barrier to gases, moisture, and grease, resistance to food component attack and flexibility.
Plastics used in food packaging must have good processability and be related to the melt flow behaviors and the thermal properties.
One of major advantage of plastics over materials like metals or glass is their ability to be processed at relatively low temperatures. However, this does cause a few problems in the use of materials.
Many foods for example have traditionally been hot filled at 80 to 100°C into glass without distorting. To make use of the plastic packaging, products are normally filled into container at about 32°C.
These low filling temperatures require aseptic processing and aseptic packaging to achieve sterility. Furthermore, these plastics should have excellent optical properties in being highly transparent and posses good sealability and printing properties.
The low density of plastic materials is one of their attractive features from the point of view of lowering shipping costs of the plastics and the finished products manufactured from them.
If the plastic packaging were to be replaced, then the figures will shows that:
*Energy consumption would double
*Raw material consumption would quadruple
*The volume of waste would increase by 150%
*The cost of packaging would double
Plastic packaging for food
