State of the Industry: Flexible Packaging

One sustainable solution for flexible packaging is compostable material, such as Uline’s packaging made from plants. | Credit: Packaging Impressions by Kalie VanDewater

As the packaging industry continues to evolve, it is critical for flexible packaging providers to meet customer demands and keep up with — and hopefully surpass — their competition. Excitingly, new data from the Flexible Packaging Association (FPA) show that the flexible packaging industry is booming.

“Overall, flexibles are growing,” says Dani Diehlmann, vice president of communications at FPA. “We are wrapping up our state of the industry report now and we are right on par with corrugated, which is pretty amazing. We’ve always been second, but now we’re tied with them, so we’ve gained market share that way.”

Here’s a look into the current state of the flexible packaging segment.

Operational Concerns
Like many manufacturing industries — the entirety of the printing industry among them — the flexible packaging segment is concerned with boosting efficiency and productivity. However, a dearth of skilled labor in recent years makes that a bit more difficult to achieve.

“There are tons of open positions, but we need the people to fill them,” Diehlmann says. “... It’s all across the board, but mostly the skilled labor and the floor workers.”

In response, converters in the flexible packaging industry are increasingly turning toward automation to support their growth goals.

“These are well-paying, challenging jobs — challenging in that there’s opportunities to grow and to advance, there’s a chance to really use ideas and suggestions on how we approach and maximize the solution,” says Tom Egan, vice president of industry services at PMMI. “The lack of the workforce is now what’s driving some additional automation trends to try and reduce the need and the dependence on the workforce.”

While workforce shortages continue to pose a challenge, it’s not all doom and gloom. According to Egan, supply chain issues that began during the COVID-19 pandemic seem to have all but vanished.

“One of the trends that we did not hear as much about now that we still had in 2023 is the supply chain,” he says. “Many elements of what were happening in the supply chain, as a result of beginning to come out of the pandemic, are not showing up now. There may still be some delayed items, but the number of them — especially on the electronic side — that were impacting deliveries from suppliers of packaging and processing to their customers has been really reduced.”

Sustainability
Environmental responsibility is especially important for those in the flexible packaging segment, as these substrates face particularly harsh scrutiny on the environmental front.

According to Gary Jones, vice president of environmental, health, and safety affairs at PRINTING United Alliance, the threat of customers abandoning flexible packaging for non-polymer-based substrates is the No. 1 concern for these converters.

“It really gets a lot of negative press — a lot of negative attention — because of the challenges associated with the recyclability of that material,” Jones says.

It’s important to note that while recycling flexible packaging may be more complicated, it’s far from impossible. Jones explains that mechanical recycling is the most prevalent method out there — meaning that materials are turned into pellets, which can be used to make a recycled product or a product that is a mixture of recycled and virgin resins without undergoing a chemical change.

Jones offers this example of what some companies are doing: “They take flexible films and recycle it into plastic lumber. They’ve been doing that for a long time, and they’ve set up collection sites. You do have an outlet from that respect, but how much plastic lumber can you make when you have mountains of plastic bags and flexible packaging? They can only take a certain amount; you can only sell a certain amount of plastic lumber.”

Legislation
Tying into the sustainability piece, some of the main challenges the flexible packaging industry is facing are regulatory in nature. Namely, there are extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws that have already passed in five states, according to Jones.

“Essentially, they’re going to charge a fee for any company that uses any covered packaging,” he says, “and the fees are going to vary based on the ability to have that material recycled. So, if you have material that’s more readily recyclable, the fee will be less.”

While providing that sort of economic incentive sounds beneficial on the surface, Jones says that the current recycling infrastructure may not be able to handle the change, flexible packaging often uses multiple polymers and metallized layers.

“Therein lies the challenge,” he explains, “because a lot of that flexible packaging — from a separation perspective — gums up the works, and they don’t particularly want films or thin layer material going to material recovery facilities.”

Related to EPR regulations, carbon black-based substances — including black inks — were recently threatened by a proposed ban in New York state. Because of pressure from PRINTING United Alliance and its members, as well as from other organizations in the printing industry, the ban was not passed.

EPR legislation is not the only obstacle, though. According to Diehlmann, California is in the process of enacting a law that would limit the use of recycling symbols on flexible packaging, known as the “Truth in Labeling for Recyclable Materials” law (State Bill 343).

“Especially if it’s a statewide approach, that’s going to be a nightmare, because all of our members produce products that go all over the place within the U.S. and internationally,” she says. “They cannot label for 50 individual states in the U.S. because they don’t know where their products are going to be going, and to what states.”

Diehlmann says the FPA is keeping an eye on this and EPR legislation, as well as the continued chemical bans and legal advances against per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

Innovation on the Forefront
One thing that is on the rise in package printing, particularly for flexible packaging, is interactive print, which Egan calls “a strong, growing trend.”
“We are the consumer in the marketplace … and we want what we want,” Egan says. “We also want to know more about the product. The ability for the QR code to provide that deeper sense, or, if you will, the total idea of the product — perhaps where it came from, potential uses, direction to a website to learn even more about it — is so much stronger [compared to non-interactive print].”

Egan says that he’s even seen QR codes display a 3D hologram of a product inside a package, which “gives a stronger shelf presence to [the product].”

Despite the bad rap flexible packaging gets on the environmental front, it is crucial to protecting the products it contains. Thus, the industry is stepping up to cut back on materials while still maintaining functionality.
“They’re still using plastics, but they’re light-weighting to help make it thinner,” Diehlmann explains. “But the main thing that packaging designers have to keep [in mind] with all of these different material transitions and trying to use different films is that you have to use the least amount of packaging but still keep all of the critical package components for barrier protection, oxygen protection, light protection. That is important, especially for food packaging and for medical packaging.”

Additionally, Diehlmann says that innovators are working to create sustainable film alternatives for flexible packaging using natural materials, such as seaweed and corn.

While there’s certainly a wealth of ingenuity on the substrate front, there is also ongoing innovation toward the end of the life cycle. As Jones previously mentioned, the most common recycling method is mechanical. Chemical recycling, on the other hand, breaks down the polymers in flexible packaging to be used as raw material and is an up-and-coming process.

“For example, we’re following a project very closely by the University of Wisconsin that, using selective solvent, they’re able to remove the different polymers from multilayer flexible packaging and they’re able to separate those,” Jones says. “They’re scaling that process up, and that’s very interesting.”

However, sufficient infrastructure for chemical recycling is not yet in place — and may never be, Jones says. That’s why he says the industry is pursuing both chemical recycling and materials innovation equally: to ensure the improved sustainability of flexible packaging.