Sustainability has become a watchword for businesses and individuals all over the world.
Our modern industrial world’s tendency to burn fuel and discard products needlessly has promoted the creation of massive landfills, air quality problems that endanger people’s health, and other serious side effects.
If you care about the sustainability of your own business’s operations and effects on the environment, you need to give serious thought to the benefits of flexible packaging.
Here are just four of the ways that this form of packaging supports environmental sustainability and responsibility.
Benefit 1: Flexible Packaging Uses Less Material
If you worry about the waste that goes into the creation of your packaging, then flexible packaging is definitely the way to go. These packages typically use just a fraction of the equivalent resources necessary to create rigid packaging.
For example, if you wanted to package 60 pounds of dried goods in traditional rigid materials, you’d end up using 50 pounds of glass, six pounds of rigid plastic, or three pounds of aluminum. That same 60 pounds of dried goods would only require 1.5 pounds of flexible packaging.
At the same time, these smaller, lighter resources require less energy to manufacture, which means less burning of fossil fuels. The involvement of less material (and, in some cases, more environmentally-safe material) also means a lower contribution to the world’s overloaded landfills.
Benefit 2: Flexible Packaging Offers a Higher Product-to-Package Ratio
Weight is just one measure of flexible packaging’s superior sustainability compared to other forms of packaging. You must also look at your product-to-packaging ratio.
The more wastefully large the package, the more negatively the impact on your carbon footprint. (If you’ve ever opened a large box and fished through mountains of packing peanuts to retrieve a small product within it, you’ve seen this wastefulness firsthand.)
Flexible packaging conforms to the product inside it, enabling you to make maximum use of the interior cubic space. Using the dried foods example noted above, if packaged in a glass bottle and metal cap it would have a product-to-package ratio of 1:1. The same product contained in flexible packaging would boast a product-to-packing ratio of 35:1.
Benefit 3: Flexible Packaging Takes Less Fuel to Transport
Any packaged goods that you place on the market have to be distributed. This distribution usually involves loading the pallets of products onto commercial trucks for transportation to distribution centers and individual stores.
It’s only logical that the more product you can transport per truckload, the fewer trucks you need to put on the road and the less fuel you will burn. Flexible packaging makes it much easier to maximize each trucks’ payload for maximum fuel efficiency.
The fact that your packaging contributes so much less weight to the overall load also helps by allowing the trucks to achieve better MPG. Even the transportation of empty, unused packages from the provider to your facility will prove more fuel efficient due to the lighter weight per unit.
Benefit 4: Flexible Packaging Results in Less Product Waste
A more subtle sustainability point, but an important one nonetheless, concerns product waste.
When a package gets broken or breached, the product it contains can easily be rendered unusable or unsellable. This kind of shrinkage forces the store to order replacement products. Either way, you now must waste extra energy to produce and ship that extra product, losing money even as you enlarge your carbon footprint.
Flexible packaging can often hold up better to impacts or other damaging influences that rigid packaging. For instance, you never have to worry about a flexible paper or a poly pouch shattering, as glass so readily does, simply because the truck hit a bump in the road or a customer dropped it in the store. Airtight flexible packaging also protects contents against oxygen and moisture more effectively than cardboard boxes or twist-tied bags.
If you care enough about your world to make the switch to sustainable flexible packaging, then you care enough to choose the best products out there. Copious Bags can equip you with lightweight, space-saving, easy-to-ship stand up bags made from recycled/recyclable materials.
You’ll not only be doing the Earth a big favor — you’ll also increase the attractiveness and cost effectiveness of your brand. Check out our line of products and see for yourself!
