These trends move the industry

As an impor­tant sign­post for the Euro­pean pack­ag­ing indus­try, FACHPACK, which will take place from Sep­tem­ber 28 to 30, claims to map trends that move the indus­try. In order to obtain empir­i­cal­ly sound results, the “FACHPACK Trend Radar” was devel­oped for the sec­ond time this year in coop­er­a­tion with VEND Con­sult­ing. The result­ing whitepa­per once again pro­vides an excit­ing overview of pack­ag­ing trends in the near future and will be avail­able for down­load to inter­est­ed par­ties from July 23, 2021 at www.packaging-360.com/trendradar2021.

“We take our mot­to ‘We make the future’ lit­er­al­ly and want to offer the indus­try real added val­ue in terms of trends as well. That’s why we’re pleased to once again be able to show our com­mu­ni­ty, in an empir­i­cal­ly sound way, which indus­try trends are expect­ed to become wide­spread in the next three to five years with the Trend Radar 2021.”

- Phillip Blass, Direc­tor FACHPACK, NürnbergMesse

 

The study design

To obtain the results, a total of 21 select­ed trends were eval­u­at­ed by rep­re­sen­ta­tives and experts of the pack­ag­ing indus­try via an online ques­tion­naire with regard to: attrac­tive­ness of the indi­vid­ual trends for the pack­ag­ing indus­try, extent of change or rel­e­vance of the trends for the same, and the time hori­zon when the indi­vid­ual trend will be suit­able for the masses.

The online ques­tion­naire was com­plet­ed in the spring of 2021 by 108 pack­ag­ing experts and indus­try insid­ers, the major­i­ty of whom hold man­age­r­i­al posi­tions. Approx­i­mate­ly 80% of par­tic­i­pants are part of a large com­pa­ny with 1000 or more employ­ees or a medi­um-sized com­pa­ny with 50 to 1000 employees.

Of the respon­dents, almost one-third work in the pack­ag­ing mate­ri­als and sup­plies sec­tor, while about 10% are active in the pack­ag­ing indus­try ser­vices, pack­ag­ing print­ing and con­vert­ing, and pack­ag­ing machin­ery seg­ments. The rest of the study par­tic­i­pants come from pack­ag­ing-relat­ed indus­tries, such as logis­tics, the food indus­try, asso­ci­a­tions, research or consulting.

The top three trends

After eval­u­at­ing the col­lect­ed data, it can be sum­ma­rized that the three upcom­ing top trends in the pack­ag­ing indus­try are all sus­tain­abil­i­ty trends. The first top trend is the increase in the use of recy­cled mate­ri­als. Recy­cling plas­tic waste and using recy­cled plas­tics in new prod­ucts con­serve pri­ma­ry raw mate­ri­als. Com­pared with pro­duc­tion from crude oil, CO2 emis­sions can thus be sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduced.

The sec­ond top trend is the use of mono­ma­te­ri­als for bet­ter sep­a­ra­bil­i­ty. In the recy­cling process, a key chal­lenge is ulti­mate­ly to sep­a­rate mate­ri­als from one anoth­er. Accord­ing to the Fed­er­al Envi­ron­ment Agency, a mate­r­i­al must con­sist of at least 95% of one main mate­r­i­al in order to be treat­ed as a mono­ma­te­r­i­al. Pack­ag­ing made from a mix of var­i­ous types of plas­tic can also be recy­cled, but the process is much more exten­sive and the recy­clate has infe­ri­or prop­er­ties to those of monomaterials.

The third top trend accord­ing to the respon­dents is resource-sav­ing pack­ag­ing. When using such pack­ag­ing, sig­nif­i­cant­ly few­er pri­ma­ry resources are used due to mate­r­i­al sav­ings, which pro­vides sig­nif­i­cant added val­ue in terms of the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of the pack­ag­ing. This can be well imple­ment­ed, for exam­ple, with the aid of new pro­duc­tion process­es. How­ev­er, a declared goal is to ensure that the func­tion­al­i­ty of the pack­ag­ing is main­tained. As a result of increased mate­r­i­al effi­cien­cy in plas­tic pack­ag­ing, for exam­ple, mate­r­i­al use has been reduced by a quar­ter over a peri­od of 25 years, cor­re­spond­ing to CO2 sav­ings of 2.6 mil­lion tons.