The Important World of Packaging and Strapping

According to Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, packaging is

"the science, art and technology of enclosing or protecting products for distribution, storage, sale, and use. Packaging also refers to the process of design, evaluation, and production of packages. Packaging can be described as a coordinated system of preparing goods for transport, warehousing, logistics, sale, and end use. Packaging contains, protects, preserves, transports, informs, and sells. In many countries it is fully integrated into government, business, institutional, industrial, and personal use."

This certainly is food for thought for those whose vision of packaging may begin and end with supermarket shelves or pretty wrappers on their Christmas presents.

In actual fact any kind of material the purpose of which is to protect its contents from damage or from perishing falls into the ambit of packaging. Storage containers on cargo ships that enable goods of irregular shape to be stacked into regular patterns are packaging, of a fashion.

It doesn't take a great deal of reflection to appreciate just how important packaging is in all our everyday lives. Goods we've ordered arrive by post in one piece because they are packaged in such a way as to ensure that they will not be broken in transit. Food can be stored in bottles and tins, sometimes for years, which would otherwise have perished within a week. And the labels on the tins tell us what they contain - an obvious statement maybe, but without this additional item of packaging we would be completely unable to distinguish between a tin of soup and twelve ounces of pineapple rings.

Similarly furniture, machinery, indeed more or less anything that we take for granted both in a domestic and an industrial environment, arrives surrounded by packaging - usually polythene bags, irritating shavings of polystyrene and a sturdy wooden or cardboard box surrounded by strapping.

Some of the more inspired inventions in the world of packaging would include shrink wrap and stretch film, and often on an industrial scale these are applied through the use of dedicated machinery. It would not be an exaggeration to say that packaging has itself become an industry and a field of expert endeavour.