Making firm in-roads into sustainable packaging solutions, french smoked fish firm MerAlliance won an award at the french “Packaging Oscars” for its 100-percent recyclable eco-packaging for smoked fish.
Winning the environmental category at the award ceremony in November, privately-owned MerAlliance said in a statement, "the jury remarked on the coherence between MerAlliance's action and its engagement towards sustainability."
Each year a massive 1.3 billion tons of food products are allegedly lost globally between agricultural production and final consumption, claims a study from German researchers TheConsumerView.
Arguably, industry players who find packaging solutions to this challenging and pressing problem of loss and waste will see gains.
Together with the firm Virgin Bio Pack, MerAlliance developed an eco-packaging made from cardboard, printed on both sides with vegetable-based inks. A very thin film covers the cardboard to stop any interaction between the board and the food product.
The whole product is then covered with the skin packaging process whereby heated plastic is lowered onto the board and drawn down around the product by vacuum. Wherever the hot plastic meets the adhesive, a bond is formed.
Loss and waste — compounded by more mouths to feed across the world — means food players need to come up with some fitting solutions.
According to TheConsumerView, more than 40 percent of the losses in developed countries are generated during the sales and consumer phases.
Compounding these figures are studies on waste performed in France by Ademe. They found that 20 kilograms of food products a year, per capita, are thrown away, of which 7 kilograms are still packaged.
Manufacturing mass-marketed products or goods involves the use of resources and raw materials and generates different impacts. "Therefore, when a product, packaged or not, is lost or wasted, it means that all the resources used to make this product have also been lost or wasted," underlines the French Packaging Council, a non-profit organization for the country's packaging industry.
