When any of us go shopping, we’re faced with walls upon walls of plastic-wrapped goods. You pick up a cucumber wrapped in film, a pack of biscuits sealed in a foil-lined packet, a bottle of shampoo that seems to have more plastic than product – and you can’t help but feel that it’s all so unnecessary, so excessive.
Why is everything packaged in plastic?
The uncomfortable truth is that plastic is doing a job that no other material can do. It’s genuinely difficult to replace. It’s not there to annoy you, and it’s not there to wreck the environment. It’s not part of some huge conspiracy.
Plastic is there because, for all its faults, it is astonishingly good at what it does.
The conversation around packaging is rarely simple, but it often gets reduced to “use paper instead”, or “why not use biodegradable plastic?”. A more honest look at packaging reveals a complex picture, where things aren’t as one-sided as we might think, or even wish.
Plastic just works
The primary job of any packaging is to protect what’s inside. It’s a shield against the world. In this role, plastic excels in ways that are hard to overstate.
It stops oxygen, moisture, and contaminants from reaching the product with an efficiency that literally no other materials can match. And the biggest argument for plastic comes from the world of agriculture, logistics, and food production.
When wrapped in a thin layer of plastic film, the shelf life of a cucumber can be extended from a few days to well over a week. Think about how that has dramatically reduced food waste, and fed so many.
And that’s really the heart of it all. We have so many people in this world to feed, and without plastic, we simply couldn’t do it.
This protective function is amplified in more sophisticated packaging. For products stored under modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) – which is common for foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals and medical devices – the packaging material is critical. It must maintain a specific gas composition to keep the product safe. These packaging systems often rely on plastics with exceptional barrier properties (like our specialty, polythene).
Weight and emissions
One of the most significant and often overlooked advantages of plastic is its weight. On average, plastic packaging is about 3.6 times lighter than alternative materials like glass or aluminium. It’s lighter than paper and card, as well as being far more effective as a barrier.
This matters enormously because weight equals emissions. A lighter package means more products can be transported per lorry, less fuel is burned, and fewer greenhouse gases are emitted.
One study estimated that substituting plastic with other materials could increase energy demand across the lifecycle by a factor of 2.2 – enough to heat 20 million homes. Another analysis found that polythene packaging can have up to 70% lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to alternatives like paper, glass, or metal. Paper bags use up to 400% more resources to make than polythene bags, come from highly destructive paper mills, and are essentially single use.
Read more – Is the Push to Cut Plastic from Everything Even Possible?
Plastic uses very little material to do its job, so it usually comes out ahead in a lifecycle comparison. It’s a difficult truth to swallow, but the environmental impact of a product’s journey from factory to shop floor is heavily influenced by the weight of its packaging – and compared to everything else, plastic is the lightest resource available.
Tamper evidence and cost
Beyond the environmental calculations, plastic offers two other crucial, but less discussed, advantages: it’s cheap, and it provides visible security.
For manufacturers, the low cost of plastic polymers compared to alternatives is a really big draw. It allows for packaging that is affordable and accessible, keeping the cost of goods down for consumers.
Plastics can also create tamper-evident seals and secure packaging, a luxury few of us consider. The broken seal on a plastic bottle or a puncture in the film protecting medical supplies is immediately obvious. While other materials can offer security, like metal tins and glass ampules, they often do so at a higher cost, with less convenience, and more risk.
Plastic is the sweet spot, and that’s why absolutely everything seems to be packaged in it!
So then, why the bad rap?
If it’s so great, why is plastic so demonised?
Plastic pollution is visible, infuriating, and – just like the packaging itself – absolutely everywhere. Not a day goes by without microplastics making headlines. Not a day goes by without more plastic filling the ocean (a shocking 30,000 tons of plastic are dumped in oceans and waterways every day).
It’s gone past choking turtles and seabirds, and entered our food chains and bloodstreams.
And consumers are tired of it.
People want change – but they don’t understand that, without plastic, their lives would collapse.
Read next: Customers Demand Green Packaging – But Don’t Know The Truth
So, even though plastic has a PR problem, an environmental problem, a science problem, and a public health problem – it solves about a million other problems. From food supply to healthcare, from logistics to hazardous waste disposal, plastic touches every single part of our lives.
From cradle to grave, plastic is part of our story. We simply cannot live without it.
But it seems we can’t live with it, either. So – what can we do?
Confronting the poor end of life of plastic
For all its functional brilliance, plastic’s biggest weakness is devastating. Its end of life is a mess. The very properties that make it so useful – its durability and resistance to degradation – are the ones that cause immense environmental harm.
Naturally, we’ve sought alternatives. Plant-based plastics seem like a holy grail, until you realise that they just solve one problem and create another. Not all “bio” plastic is biodegradable. In fact, no matter what you prefix it with, it’s still just plastic. We just got there differently.
The production of plastic waste has more than doubled since 2000, reaching a staggering 353 million tons, with packaging accounting for 40% of it.
Much of this waste ends up in landfills, is incinerated, or just leaks into our oceans and ecosystems – breaking down into microplastics that pose a serious threat to wildlife and human health.
What do we do next?
The search for a better way
The ideal future lies in a circular economy, where plastic packaging is designed to be reusable, recyclable, and where systems are in place to actually recycle it.
This is a monumental challenge. Way harder than you’d imagine at first.
That’s because most plastic packaging is a complex, multi-layer structure of different polymers – making it incredibly difficult to separate and recycle. The solution will take major design changes, moving towards monomaterial packaging that is easier to recycle, and a massive investment in better waste management infrastructure.
Read next: Why is Recycling Plastic so Hard?
International industrial standardisation is also key to this, because a vast amount of packaging is produced and imported from overseas.
Bioplastics are not a silver bullet. Paper, metal, and glass are worse in all conceivable metrics. The alternatives don’t necessarily solve the problem of littering, and require specific conditions to biodegrade or recycle – conditions which are not found in the natural world, at least not on our timescales.
The path forward is complex, and will require a blend of better materials, smarter design, and a more responsible culture of consumption and disposal.
It all starts with industry, and consumer pressure can help. But the bottom line is the bottom line: until it’s cheaper to do the right thing, we’ll always have irresponsible waste handling.
Get responsible, recyclable polythene – from NPF Packaging
Want to learn more about how we work with recycled and recyclable polythene packaging? Contact us or call 01773 820415.