Environmental protection is a common concern in today's society. A large amount of packaging waste has caused tremendous pressure on the environment. Among them, packaging waste generated by people consuming large amounts of food each day accounts for a large proportion. And packaging waste is mainly solid waste and it is difficult to handle. The treatment of plastics is mainly burial, with a small amount of decomposition and incineration. The buried plastic needs 200 to 400 years to be decomposed by the natural world. During this time, it will impede the growth of crops, the animals will eat, and the digestive system diseases will be caused when it is light, and it will be dead if it is heavy. The disposal of metal and glass containers does not have pollution problems, but they are too heavy and require a lot of energy to melt. Therefore, the hazards to the environment should be fully considered in the design, use, and recycling of food packaging, and should be avoided as much as possible.
In order to reduce the environmental damage caused by packaging waste, China introduced the concept of “green packaging” in 1993. Green packaging takes into consideration both the protection of the environment and the regeneration of resources, specifically:
1. Reduce packaging. That is, packaging should meet the requirements of protection, convenience, sales, etc., and the amount should be reduced as much as possible.
When selecting packaging materials, use lightweight, thin materials as much as possible. Use lighter, thinner glass bottles for drinks. A glass factory in Germany developed a 1kg ultra-thin glass bottle with a bottle wall of only 1.4mm and a transparent 0.1mm thick polyurethane urethane film on the outside of the glass. This film not only increases the strength of the ultra-thin glass, but also does not splatter the glass fragments once the glass breaks. The use of such bottles for mineral water or lemonade is much lighter than using ordinary glass bottles. In addition, a new type of magnesium material can be used to partially replace the metal packaging material, and a small packaging can with a strong texture, beautiful appearance and light weight can be used instead of a tin can.
In Japan and the United States, the method of reducing the thickness of plastic packaging materials and reducing the weight of packaging is used to reduce the total amount of packaging waste.
2. Packaging should be easy to reuse or easy to recycle
This is the most practical and feasible step in the development of green packaging materials at this stage, and it is the most active approach to waste recycling. The currently used polyester beverage bottles, baby bottles, and glass beer bottles can be reused many times. If it cannot be reused, it is decomposed as much as possible and melted to reform.
3. Packing waste can degrade and corrupt without forming permanent waste.
Degradable plastics are being studied all over the world to solve the serious environmental problems caused by the inability of current plastics to degrade. The principle of degradation is to disintegrate and reduce the plastic in the natural environment through the action of microorganisms in the soil and water, or through the action of ultraviolet rays in the sunlight, and finally reenter the ecological environment in a non-toxic form and return to nature.
At present, pulp molded tableware and bio-degradable plastic tableware have basically replaced disposable expanded polystyrene plastic tableware, which relieves the pressure on environmental protection to a large extent.
4. Packaging materials should be harmless to humans and organisms. The packaging material should not contain toxic elements or heavy metals, or the content should be controlled below relevant standards.
5. Packaging products shall not cause pollution to the human body or the environment from the collection, processing, manufacturing of products, use of products, recovery of wastes, and final processing.
The first four points are the requirements that green packaging must have, and the last point is the ideal top-level requirements for green packaging.
Source: PACK.CN
