subject: The Importance of Strapping and Packaging [print this page] The Importance of Strapping and Packaging
According to Wikipedia, the 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 is certainly food for thought for all those whose vision of packaging may begin and end with products on supermarket shelves or ornate wrappings on their Christmas presents.
In fact any kind of material whose purpose is to protect its contents from damage or perishment falls into the category of packaging. Big containers on cargo ships that enable goods of irregular shape to be stacked into regular patterns are packaging of a sort.
It does not take a great deal of reflection for us to realise how very important packaging is in our everyday lives. Goods we have ordered arrive through the post in one piece because they are packaged in such a way as to ensure that they will not be damaged in transit. Food can be stored in bottles andcans, sometimes for years, which would otherwise have perished in little more than a week. The labels on the cans tell us what they contain an obvious statement maybe, but without this additional item of packaging we would be entirely unable to distinguish between a tin of beans and twelve ounces of sweetcorn.
Similarly furniture, machinery, and indeed more or less anything we take for granted both in a domestic and an industrial environment arrives fortified by packaging usually polythene bags, myriad shavings of polystyrene and a sturdy wooden or cardboard box surrounded by strapping.
Some of the more inspired, if simple inventions in the world of packaging would include pallet wrappers and gummed tape, and often on an industrial scale these are applied by dedicated machinery. It would not be an exaggeration to say that packaging has itself become an industry and a field of expert endeavour.
